From: Ann Shumelda Okerson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2015 21:10:50 -0400

Agree with Jean-Claude but for a different reason.  Early in the last
decade, I was part of a librarian focus group invited to London to
meet with Tracz to talk about about BioMed Central.  There may have
been 15-20 of us in the room, and a number were passionate open access
advocates.  When asked if he were pursuing this idea because of a
powerful conviction/passion for open access, Tracz said clearly that
he is a publisher and businessman, one who sees in open access a solid
business opportunity -- which would also help on the access side.
Many hearts fell and many spirits sagged, for indeed there had been an
expectation of meeting an open access "hero," but here instead was a
smart, strategic business innovator.

Ann Okerson/CRL



On Thu, Sep 24, 2015 at 7:04 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> From: "Guédon Jean-Claude" <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2015 10:20:42 +0000
>
> I am not so sure that Vitek Tracz is such a "hero" of the open access
> movement by inventing (or is it Jan Velterop?) APC's..
>
> APCs have proved to be very problematic indeed::
>
> 1. They create inequalities at the author level that never existed before
> (including between disciplines, between rich and poor countries, between
> rich and poor institutions);
>
> 2. They have given rise to a horror story called hybrid journals;
>
> 3. The have opened the door to an even worse story called deceptive (or
> predatory, as some say) journals.
>
> Hard to be a hero after that.
>
> jcg
>
> ________________________________________
> From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Mon, 21 Sep 2015 16:03:38 +0100
>
> Vitek Tracz is a hero of the open access movement, and it is not hard
> to see why. Fifteen years ago he founded the world’s first for-profit
> OA publisher BioMed Central (BMC), and pioneered pay-to-publish gold
> OA. Instead of charging readers a downstream subscription fee, BMC
> levies an upfront article-processing charge, or APC. By doing so it is
> able to cover its costs at the time of publication, and so make the
> papers it publishes freely available on the Internet.
>
> Many said Tracz’s approach would not work. But despite initial
> scepticism BMC eventually convinced other publishers that it had a
> sustainable business model, and so encouraged them to put their toes
> in the OA waters too. As such, OA advocates believe BMC was vital to
> the success of open access. As Peter Murray-Rust put it in 2010,
> “Without Vitek and BMC we would not have open access”.
>
> Today Tracz has a new, more radical, mission, which he is pursuing with
> F1000.
>
> A Q&A with Tracz is available here:
> http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/the-open-access-interviews-f1000.html
>
> A commentary on the issues arising from the interview is separately
> available here: http://richardpoynder.co.uk/Tracz_Interview.pdf
>
> Richard Poynder