Bryan Vickery joins as deputy publisher, with responsibility for the Chemistry Central portal launched in August. He will also develop a portfolio of open access journals in chemistry.
Chris Leonard will lead the development of open access titles in physics, maths and computer science. At Elsevier, Vickery experimented with open access chemistry resources with ChemWeb.com. This work led to his belief in the pressing need for open access. “There needs to be a change for the science and technology community, and Biomed Central is leading the way.” He highlighted further issues in scientific publishing. “SMEs don’t have access to literature and have a need for better indexing.”
Vickery joined Biomed Central because it has been developed as a totally open access publisher. “It is streamlined and the business model is transparent, so we can keep costs down and offer good products and services. Traditional publishers could all move to open access tomorrow, but the loss of revenue to shareholders would be too great to bear,” he said.
He added, “The cost of publishing to research communities is too high. Once we all get into open access we can start competing properly. We are seeing lots of publishers trialling OA as they are under pressure from funding agencies, such as RCUK and Wellcome Trust, which want to see greater value from the research they fund.” ...
Leonard has a background in physics publishing, along with experience in Web 2.0 technology. He is currently researching the needs of the physics community before launching new titles in 2007. “With major research organisations such as CERN backing open access, and with many scientists calling for open access options in their field, the time is right to develop open access journals that can take full advantage of new technologies to communicate research findings openly, and to meet the challenges of the future,” Leonard says.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/02/2007 08:15:00 AM.
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.