June/July 2006

Leslie Carr of the University of Southampton, is technical director of the open-source EPrints.org software. This software is used in more than 200 institutional repositories around the world.

As head of CERN's library, Jens Vigen works with a large number of physicists from all over the world and is seeking to ensure that their research output can be read by others in the physics community and beyond.

Alma Swan is director of consultancy firm Key Perspectives. She has written a number of reports on open access.

Matthew Cockerill is publisher of BioMed Central, a publisher that is making a business out of the open-access publishing model.

The New Journal of Physics was an early example of a traditional publisher launching an open-access journal. Tim Smith of Institute of Physics Publishing (IOPP) is the journal's publisher.

Stevan Harnad of the University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada and the University of Southampton, UK is considered by many to have been one of the founders of the open-access movement. He believes that self-archiving in institutional repositories is the answer to providing access.

The Wellcome Trust, which funds research in the life sciences and medicine, was the first research funder to make open access a condition of its grants. Robert Terry is the organisation's senior policy adviser.

Michael Mabe has been Elsevier's director of academic relations for the past seven years, although he has just left to become CEO of the International STM Association. The views expressed here are from his own industry experience.

Martin Richardson is managing director of Oxford Journals, a division of Oxford University Press, which last year announced its Oxford Open option, where authors can choose to pay to make their articles open access.