From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2015 12:13:20 +0000

In his time, the founder and president of ScienceOpen, Alexander
Grossmann, has sat on both sides of the scholarly publishing table. He
started out as a researcher and lecturer, working variously at the
Jülich Research Centre, the Max Planck Institute in Munich and the
University of Tübingen.

Then in 2001 he reinvented himself as a publisher, working first at
Wiley-Blackwell, and subsequently as managing director at
Springer-Verlag GmbH in Vienna, and a vice president at De Gruyter.

An important moment for Grossmann came in 2008, when Springer acquired
the open-access publisher BioMed Central from serial entrepreneur
Vitek Tracz. Listening to a presentation on the purchase given at a
management meeting by the company’s CEO Derk Haank, Grossmann
immediately saw the logic of the move, and the imperatives of open
access.

In 2013, therefore, Grossmann partnered with Boston-based entrepreneur
and software developer Tibor Tscheke to found a for-profit OA venture
called ScienceOpen. At the same time, he took a post as professor of
publishing management at the Leipzig University of Applied Sciences.

A Q&A with Grossmann can be accessed here:

http://poynder.blogspot.de/2015/11/the-oa-interviews-scienceopens.html