From: David Prosser <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2015 07:43:29 +0000

Tracz didn’t invent author charges - many ‘subscription' journals have
page charges, colour figure charges, excess page charges, etc., etc. -
and those inequalities have been around for decades.  In many cases
APCs (especially those of BMC) are less than the author charges of
‘elite’ journals.  And a lot of reputable OA publishers will waive
APCs if asked so reducing author inequality.

I don’t think that there is a system invented by humans that has not
be perverted at some level by the unscrupulous for gain - that cynical
hybrid journal publishers are milking the system for profit or that
‘predatory’ publishers are gaining reward for publishing a tiny number
of papers that otherwise may not have been published is as much
Tracz’s fault as ‘predatory’ subscription publishers are the fault of
whoever ‘invented’ subscriptions.

I don’t think that Tracz has ever held himself up as a hero, but it is
clear that as a result of his innovations there are now tens of
thousands of papers that are free to read, mine, and reuse for all.
Not too shabby, I’d say.

David


On 25 Sep 2015, at 00:04, 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