From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 2 Feb 2012 13:55:33 +0000

Currently CEO of Academic Concept Knowledge Limited (AQnowledge), Jan
Velterop has in his time worked for Elsevier, Academic Press,
Springer, Nature and BioMed Central. He was one of the architects of
the controversial Big Deal, and one of the small group of people who
attended the 2001 meeting in Budapest that led to the Budapest Open
Access Initiative (BOAI), and thus to the birth of the Open Access
movement.

Some snippets from the interview:

On the financial benefits of abandoning today’s peer review system in
favour of the “endorsement” model pioneered by the physics preprint
server arXiv:

“If there are 1.5 million articles a year published, and the average
savings are in the order of $2000 (assuming the ArXiv per-article cost
of some $7 is valid elsewhere for ArXiv-like outfits as well, and no
journals are published in print), the savings amount to in the order
of $3 billion a year.”

On the future of scholarly publishing, and the role of publishers:

“The evolution of scientific communication will go on, without any
doubt, and although that may not mean the total demise of the
traditional models, these models will necessarily change. After all,
some dinosaur lineages survived as well. We call them birds. And there
are some very attractive ones. They are smaller than the dinosaurs
they evolved from, though. Much smaller.”

On the Research Works Act:

“I truly don’t understand how a sophisticated industry could get
itself into a PR disaster like the RWA.”

More here: http://bit.ly/z28qoR

Richard Poynder