Richard Poynder interviews Vitek Tracz in the January 3 issue of Information Today. Excerpt: 'A serial entrepreneur remarkable for being one of the few remaining innovators in the STM publishing industry, Vitek Tracz, chairman of the London-based Current Science Group, has, over the years, created a series of mold-breaking businesses under the Current Science Group umbrella, including Gower Medical Publishing, Current Drugs, and the Current Opinion series of journals. Convinced that all research must ultimately be freely available on the Web, Tracz has become a powerful advocate for open access. He was a key player in the development of PubMed Central, NIH's free literature repository, and, in 1998, he founded the first open access publisher, BioMed Central....[Quoting Tracz:] Biomedical science simply can't function efficiently anymore without open, unrestricted access to research results....We have seen how important this is with the genome. As a consequence, it is important to completely rethink the way science reports its findings, and this is a big challenge to science publishers as well as to scientists....[At BioMed Central] 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 open access publishing will never be as profitable as the current system of selling subscriptions, we are confident it can and will be profitable....Submissions to our journals are now running at more than 700 papers a month. A year ago, this figure was 300; 2 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 percent of papers are published open access. I believe that when this becomes more like 5 percent, 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....Self-archiving is, of course, very desirable, but the issue is quite simple: Publishers are not really going to allow authors to self-archive in an easy way, and authors are not going to do it unless it is completely painless....However, we publishers must remember that the issue is not what is good for publishers, but what is good for science. It is neither in the interests of funders nor of authors not to embrace open access. It is only in the interests of traditional publishers to continue the status quo. If some publishers find that there is no money in publishing, they will do something else. The central point in the open access debate is that it is essential for science and beneficial for society. That is what makes it inevitable.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/03/2005 08:34:00 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.
