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