Essential for Science.

This article presents an interview with Vitek Tracz, chairman of the London-based Current Science Group, which has created a series of businesses under the Current Science Group umbrella, including Gower Medical Publishing, Current Drugs, and the Current Opinion series of journals. He was a key player in the development of PubMed Central, National Institute of Health's free literature repository, and in 1998, he founded the first open access publisher, BioMed Central. He studied film making and started Medi-Cine, which makes medical films. According to him, some years later he decided to stop making films and become a publisher. Thus, he started Gower Medical Publishing. Tim Hailstone joined him a year later from the medical publisher Churchill Livingstone. In 1984, they sold Gower to Harper and Row. Then they decided to publish the Current Opinion review journals. He said that they went to develop a range of Current Opinion journals in medicine and biology, which became very successful and are still published. In 1996, they moved into Web publishing and launched BioMedNet. They sold the Current Opinion medical journals to Thomson but kept the biology ones and launched BioMedNet. After 2 years they sold BioMedNet to Reed Elsevier. Then they turned their attention to patent information. After developing the Investigational Drugs Database and selling it to Thomson in 2002, they created BioMed Central in 1998. Then they eventually launched PubMed Central and the Public Library of Science. According to Tracz, they need about 2,000 to 2,5000 papers a month to break even. He also said that while open access publishing will never be as profitable as the current system of selling subscriptions, they are confident it can and will be profitable.