One of the leading lights of the open access movement - dedicated to making academic research freely available to everyone over the internet - has joined the ranks of the traditional publishing world.
Jan Velterop, publishing director of pioneering open access publisher BioMed Central is joining Germany's Springer, the world's second largest producer of scientific journals, as director of open access, heading up its fledgling open access publishing arm. "I'm not going to the dark side," he said yesterday. "Parts of the dark side, including Springer, are seeing the light." The move of such a high profile figure from the open access movement marks an endorsement of Springer's foray into open access and could present a challenge to the market leader in scientific journals, Reed Elsevier.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/16/2005 10:18:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
