From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2015 11:56:42 +0100

Hi Jean-Claude,

I agree with you 100%. APCs are deeply problematic (for all the
reasons you mention) and they have done a great disservice to the OA
movement. However, I do not think that this is a widely held view
amongst OA advocates. Certainly I get a lot of push-back when I
express such views.

By the way, I did not say that Tracz invented APCs, but that he
pioneered them — by making them the means of funding open access at
BMC. My recollection is that the first person to propose the use of
author fees was Stevan Harnad, on the American Scientist Open Access
Forum. Perhaps Vitek Tracz/ Jan Velterop got the idea from there.

Given your views on APCs I wonder whether your reservations extend to
the whole BMC project. I suspect you have never published with the
company but I see it has published an encomium by you on its "comments
from users" page (your comment is about its copyright policy rather
than its use of APCs): http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/usercomments

Richard


On 25 September 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