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