LOGOS Not Written in the Stars Vitek Tracz, founder of publisher BioMed Central, talks to Richard Poynder*

Richard Poynder Chairman of the Science Navigation Group,1 Vitek Tracz was born in a Jewish shtetl in Poland during the Second World War. When the Germans in- vaded Poland his parents fl ed to Russia, and spent fi ve years in Siberia. Those members of his family who stayed in Poland were killed by the Germans. After the war Tracz and his family returned to Poland, before subsequently emigrating to Israel. Keen to attend fi lm school Tracz later moved to Richard Poynder writes about information technol- London, where he settled. After making a number ogy, telecommunications, and intellectual property. of fi lms, however, he turned his hand to medical In particular, he specialises in online services, elec- publishing, and went on to build a series of success- tronic information systems, the Internet, Open Ac- ful publishing businesses, including Gower Medi- cess, e-Science and e-Research, cyberinfrastructure, cal Publishing, Current Drugs and the Current digital rights management, Creative Commons, Open Opinion series of journals. Source Software, Free Software, copyright, patents, and patent information. Modus operandi He has contributed to a wide range of specialist, na- Tracz quickly developed a distinctive modus oper- tional and international publications, and edited and andi, creating mould-breaking businesses that he co-authored two books: Hidden Value and Caught in then sold on to large publishing companies like a Web, Intellectual Property in Cyberspace. He has also Harper & Row, , and Thomson Corpora- contributed to radio programmes. tion, invariably at very attractive prices. Constantly on the look-out for challenging busi- E-mail: [email protected] ness ventures, by the late 1990s Tracz had become Website: http://www.richardpoynder.co.uk convinced that the disruptive of the Inter- net would make it increasingly diffi cult for scien- tifi c, technical and medical (STM) publishers to charge readers to access scholarly journals, particu- larly as the focus of their businesses began to shift from selling print journals, to licensing large elec- tronic databases like Elsevier’s ScienceDirect.2 For a start, researchers were discovering that they were now easily able to distribute their research for themselves over the Web. Since 1991, for instance, physicists had been self-archiving their papers in the arXiv3 repository; and there were growing calls for academics in other disciplines to follow suit.4 At the same time, the “serials crisis”5 had sparked a tide of unrest amongst librarians, who were strug- gling to pay for all the journals and other scholarly information their faculty demanded; unrest that DOI: 10.1163/095796510X546931

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was beginning to coalesce around the incipient With the assistance of Velterop, Tracz also be- Open Access Movement.6 came an effective behind-the-scenes advocate, en- Advocates of Open Access (OA) argue that in couraging, for instance, the then director of the US a networked world publicly-funded research should National Institutes of Health,10 Harold Varmus, to be made freely available, not sold as part of a paid- create the free literature repository PubMed Cen- for online service. Their reasoning is that research- tral,11 and recruiting researchers, librarians and key ers give their papers to publishers, and do all the decision-makers to the OA cause. essential peer review work, without any payment. Once the print and distribution costs have been re- moved from the system, therefore, most of the costs While Tracz believed that of publishing have gone away.7 in time publishers would Intrigued by the challenge this posed for STM publishers, in 1998 Tracz created the fi rst open ac- have no choice but to cess publisher, BioMed Central (BMC). accept OA, it became What was radical about BMC was not so much that it was an online-only publisher, but that it had clear that they were turned the traditional publishing model on its head: not prepared to give instead of charging readers to read scholarly papers, BMC charged authors (or more usually authors’ up the benefi ts of the funders or institutions) to publish them – by means subscription-based model of an article processing charge (APC) of $525. By front-loading the costs in this way, BMC was without a fi ght. able to meet growing demands that publicly-fund- ed research be available outside fi nancial fi rewalls, while still covering the cost of organising peer re- It was quickly apparent however that, whatever view, and marking up and editing the papers. its merits, OA publishing would never be the pot of gold that STM publishers were accustomed to. By Credibility insisting that authors assign copyright as a condi- Having acquired a reputation amongst cognoscenti tion of publishing their papers, scholarly publishers of the STM publishing community as a creative had, since the war, managed to acquire exclusive entrepreneur with an uncanny knack for turning ownership of a great deal of the world’s research unlikely ideas into successful businesses (invariably output – thereby enabling them to earn profi ts that by exploiting innovative technology), in launch- most industries would give their eye teeth for. ing BMC Tracz provided the OA Movement with Moreover, as publishers moved to electronic a credibility not unlike that provided to the Open delivery it seemed that profi t levels could be even Source Movement when, in the same year as BMC greater, since publishers were increasingly no long- was founded, IBM announced that it would support er selling print journals that libraries could own in Apache, the Open Source web server software.8 perpetuity, but temporary access to single papers Importantly, Tracz had developed a plausible in vast electronic databases containing millions of business model – one that was later also to encour- individual scholarly papers. Since libraries would age a number of traditional publishers to experi- never actually “own” copies of these papers, pub- ment with Open Access themselves.9 lishers could, in theory, charge users every time a In addition, by appointing the articulate and paper was accessed.12 widely respected publisher Jan Velterop to manage Unsurprisingly therefore, rather than embracing BMC, Tracz was able to position the company as OA, publishers were more inclined to conduct ag- a spokes-organisation for the OA Movement, and gressive lobbying campaigns aimed at neutralising thus an ally of those who believed that scientifi c OA initiatives. As a result of publisher lobbying, research should be freely available. for instance, PubMed Central was effectively emas-

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