Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Richard Poynder interviews Vitek Tracz

Richard Poynder has posted his interview with Vitek Tracz, founder of BioMed Central. This is the latest installment of The Basement Interviews, Poynder's blog-based OA book of interviews with leaders of many related openness initiatives. Like all of Poynder's interviews, this one is long and rich in historical detail --in this case, on the rise of the OA movement, the founding of BMC, the choicepoints between OA journals and OA repositories, and the recent troubles or growing pains at BMC. This excerpt is a small part of what's worth reading:

Tracz is...at pains to stress that OA is more than just a commercial issue. While conceding that he is a businessman, and so believes that making profits is a legitimate activity for scholarly publishers, he adds, however, that since OA is plainly beneficial to society "there is an ethical reason for insisting that it happens."...

[According to an industry insider,] "Vitek should have a star role in the history of Open Access, because he was one of the first to pick up the signals, and to get in touch with Varmus, and the other people who started [PMC and] PLoS.... He has also been talking to NIH for a long time. More importantly, he had the vision and the guts to do something about OA."...

RP: Do you think the development of the Web means that OA is in any case inevitable?

VT: I think so. But it is not just that the Web has made it possible: biomedical science simply can't function efficiently any more without open, unrestricted access to research results....[W]e have seen from our experience with the genome how important it is that the data is free and that everyone can access it. What this means is that we have to completely re-think the way science reports its findings, including the basic idea of the paper and why is it written....[J]ust think how many businesses grew up around the genome, and how many inventions have been made because the data is all in one freely available database and people can gather it and play with it....

RP: Currently, however, neither BioMed Central nor the Public Library of Science makes money, and some maintain that OA publishing will never be financially viable. When you gave evidence to the UK Select Committee into scientific publishing you said that you expect to be in the black sometime in 2006. Is that still the plan?

VT: Yes. We think we need about 2,000 to 2,500 papers a month to break even. We estimate that we will have around 2,000 by the end of next year. While OA publishing will never be as profitable as the current system of selling subscriptions we are confident it can and will be profitable.

RP: One of the problems you face is that authors appear to be as reluctant as publishers to adopt OA.

VT: You are completely wrong to say that. In fact, OA is growing much faster then anything I have ever experienced in my time in publishing, and it will continue to grow very fast as more and more people find out about it.

RP: Can you give me some figures to demonstrate that?

VT: Absolutely. Submissions to our journals are now running at above 700 papers a month. A year ago this figure was 300; two years ago it was about 120. So it is more than doubling each year. We know that authors who have published Open Access once publish that way again. And they tell others. Today around 1% of papers are published OA. I believe that when this becomes more like 5% we will reach a “tipping point”. Suddenly everyone will start knowing someone who has done it and for whom it worked well, and at that point the rate of growth will increase rapidly.