Velterop to Lead Springer’s Open Access Effort

-- Library Journal, 8/26/2005

Jan Velterop, who resigned in April as publishing director of pioneering open access publisher BioMed Central, has been appointed to the newly created position of director of open access at Springer, the second-largest STM publisher. The move comes just a little over a year after Springer launched “Springer Open Choice,” offering its twist on the open access model—an “author pays” option to make articles freely available worldwide on the Internet and in print, for a fee of $3000. Velterop told the Guardian that he was not “going to the dark side,” but rather that “parts of the dark side, including Springer, are seeing the light.”

At its unveiling in July 2004, Velterop criticized Springer’s Open Choice plan, saying it fell short of being open access, since it requires “standard consent-to-publish and transfer-of-copyright agreements” from authors and also forbids “copying, reproducing, distributing, or posting of the publisher’s version of the article on a third party server.” He also pointed out that Open Choice articles made no commitment to be archived in open access repositories and criticized Springer’s hefty price, saying that “what authors have to gain is not in any way in proportion to the cost of $3000,” a price above that charged by other open access publishers. In a statement, Velterop said be believed that open access “fits in ideally with Springer’s growth strategy.”