[GOAL] The Open Access Interviews: F1000 Founder Vitek Tracz

[Richard Poynder]

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

 

 

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