In his time, the founder and president of ScienceOpen, Alexander
Grossmann, has sat on both sides of the scholarly publishing table. He started
out as a researcher and lecturer, working variously at the Jülich
Research Centre, the Max Planck
Institute in Munich and the University of Tübingen.
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| Alexander Grossmann |
Then in 2001 he reinvented himself as a publisher, working first at Wiley-Blackwell, and subsequently
as managing director at Springer-Verlag
GmbH in Vienna, and a vice president at De
Gruyter.
An important moment for Grossmann came in 2008, when Springer acquired the
open-access publisher BioMed Central
from serial entrepreneur Vitek
Tracz. Listening to a presentation on the purchase given at a management
meeting by the company’s CEO Derk Haank, Grossmann
immediately saw the logic of the move, and the imperatives of open access.
However, it was soon apparent to him that the publishing industry at
large is not in a hurry to reinvent itself for an OA world, and certainly not if
it means having to take hard decisions that could threaten the high profit
levels that it has become accustomed to earning from journal publishing.
Speaking
to me two years ago Grossmann put it this way: “[T]here is no publishing
house which is either able or willing to consider the rigorous change in their
business models which would be required to actively pursue an open access
publishing concept.”
And this remains his view today.
In 2013, therefore, Grossmann partnered with Boston-based entrepreneur
and software developer Tibor
Tscheke to found a for-profit OA venture called ScienceOpen. At the same
time he took a post as professor of publishing management at the Leipzig University of Applied Sciences.
A Q&A with Alexander can be downloaded as a pdf file here.
