[GOAL] Interview with Jan Velterop

[Richard Poynder]

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

 

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