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