The Open Access Interviews

The Open Access Interviews are a series of interviews conducted by journalist Richard Poynder with leaders, thinkers, and practitioners of the Open Access Movement. The Open Access (OA) Movement seeks to ensure the immediate, free and unrestricted online access to digital scholarly material, notably research articles published in refereed journals.

The interviews are published on the blog Open and Shut? In some cases, the full interview is available as a downloadable PDF file. The interviews are being published under a Creative Commons licence. This licence permits you to copy and distribute the interviews as you wish, so long as you credit Richard Poynder as the author, do not alter or transform the text, and do not use the interviews for any commercial purpose.

The interviews:

• The Open Access Interviews: Wellcome Trust’s Robert Kiley (August 2011)
• The Open Access Interviews: WebmedCentral’s Kamal Mahawar (August 2011)
• Interview with Open Access advocate Peter Suber: Leader of a Leaderless Revolution (July 2011)
• Open Access by Numbers (Open & Shut? June 2011)
• The OA Interviews: Bernard Rentier, Rector of the University of Liège (June 2011)
• The Demise of the Big Deal: Interview with Claudio Aspesi (Open & Shut? March 2011)
• Vitek Tracz interview re-published with update (January 2011)
• Interview with Jordan Hatcher on free and open licensing (Open & Shut? October 2010)
• The Impact of Open Notebook Science: Interview: With Jean-Claude Bradley (September 2010)
• Preserving the Scholarly Record: Interview with digital preservation specialist Neil Beagrie (Open & Shut? August 2010)
• Reed Elsevier: Need for a progressive divestiture? Interview with Claudio Aspesi (June 2010)
• The Changing Face of Academic Presses: Interview with Northwestern University's Sarah Pritchard (June 2010)
• The OA Interviews: Sciyo's Aleksandar Lazinika (February 2010)
• Interview with Stevan Harnad (February 2010)
• Eberhard Hilf, veteran German OA advocate (October 2009)
• Matthew Cockerill, Publisher, BioMed Central (October 2009)
• Hélène Bosc, convenor for the EuroScience Working Group on Science Publishing (March 2009)
• Tom Hill, Publisher Libertas Academica (January 2009)
• Tim Hill, Publisher, Dove Medical Press (November 2008)
• Annette Holtkamp, Information Professional, DESY (September 2008)
• Leslie Chan, Associate Director, Bioline International (June 2008)
• Matthew Honan, Editorial Director, Bentham Science Publishers (April 2008)
• Bill Mortimer, Research Support Librarian, Open University (April 2008)
• John Wilbanks, VP Science Commons (February 2008)
• Professor Carlos Brebbia, director of WIT Press (February 2008)
• Peter Murray-Rust, advocate for Open Access & Open Data (January 2008)
• Alma Swan, OA advocate (January 2008)
• Peter Suber, de facto leader of the Open Access Movement (October 2007)
• Stevan Harnad, OA advocate and archivangelist (July 2007)
• Leo Waaijers, Manager of SURFshare in the Netherlands (April 2007)
• Harold Varmus, Nobel Laureate and co-founder of open access publisher Public Library of Science (PLoS ONE)
• Vitek Tracz, founder of open access publisher BioMed Central
• Tony Hey, corporate vice president for technical computing at Microsoft
• Melissa Hagemann, Program Manager of the Open Access Project at George Soros' Open Society Institute
• Chris Surridge, managing editor of PLoS ONE
• Professor Richard Roberts, chief scientific officer at New England Biolabs, Nobel laureate, and Fellow of the Royal Society
• Alma Swan, co-founder and director of UK-based scholarly publishing consultancy Key Perspectives (KPL) [Part 1]
• Alma Swan, co-founder and director of UK-based scholarly publishing consultancy Key Perspectives (KPL) [Part 2]
• Catherine Candee, director of publishing and strategic initiatives in the Office of Scholarly Communication at the University of California (UC)
• Professor Subbiah Arunachalam, leading Indian OA advocate and distinguished fellow of the Chennai-based M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) [Part 1]
• Professor Subbiah Arunachalam, leading Indian OA advocate and distinguished fellow of the Chennai-based M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) [Part 2]
• Josiah Ober, professor of classics at Princeton University
• Put Up or Shut Up: Interview with Springer CEO Derk Haank (Information Today, November 2004)
• Change Is Very Exciting: Interview with Blackwell Publishing President, Bob Campbell (Information Today, September 2003)
• Mark McCabe, assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Information Today, December 2002)
• Stevan Harnad, OA advocate and archivangelist (Financial Times, July 2001)

More interviews will follow. Please note that while these interviews are made freely available to all, they are written by a freelance journalist who makes his living from writing. To assist him to continue making work available in this way you are invited to make a voluntary contribution. The suggested figure is $10 per interview, but feel free to contribute as you think appropriate. This can be done quite simply by sending a payment via PayPal quoting the email address richard.poynder@btinternet.com. It is not necessary to have a PayPal account to make a payment.

If you point anyone else to the interviews please consider directing them to this page, rather than directly to the individual interviews. If you would like to republish any of the interviews on a commercial basis, or have any comments on them, please email the author at richard.poynder@journalist.co.uk.