Elsevier duo say the future is open

Two senior publishers have departed Elsevier and joined rival Biomed Central, placing their bets on an open access future for scientific research.

Bryan Vickery joins as deputy publisher, with responsibility for the Chemistry Central portal launched in August. He will also develop a portfolio of open access journals in chemistry.

Chris Leonard will lead the development of open access titles in physics, maths and computer science. At Elsevier, Vickery experimented with open access chemistry resources with ChemWeb.com . This work led to his belief in the pressing need for open access. “There needs to be a change for
the science and technology community, and Biomed Central is leading the way.” He highlighted further issues in scientific publishing. “SMEs don’t
have access to literature and have a need for better indexing.”

Vickery joined Biomed Central because it has been developed as a totally open access publisher. “It is streamlined and the business model is
transparent, so we can keep costs down and offer good products and services. Traditional publishers could all move to open access tomorrow, but
the loss of revenue to shareholders would be too great to bear,” he said.

He added, “The cost of publishing to research communities is too high. Once we all get into open access we can start competing properly. We are
seeing lots of publishers trialling OA as they are under pressure from funding agencies, such as RCUK and Wellcome Trust , which want to see
greater value from the research they fund.”

He added that Biomed Central is working with the Pubchem database and other open source repositories.

Leonard has a background in physics publishing, along with experience in Web 2.0 technology. He is currently researching the needs of the physics
community before launching new titles in 2007. “With major research organisations such as CERN backing open access, and with many scientists
calling for open access options in their field, the time is right to develop open access journals that can take full advantage of new technologies to
communicate research findings openly, and to meet the challenges of the future,” Leonard says.

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