Happy birthday to Springer ’s open access books programme!

Springer was one of the first major publishers to offer open access (OA) books, and the first science, technology and medicine publisher to do so. A year before the official launch of its OA books programme in August 2012, Springer published its first OA book: Future Internet Assembly 2011: Achievements and Technological Promises (Editors: Domingue, J., Galis, A., Gavras, A., Zahariadis, T., Lambert, D., Cleary, F., Daras, P., Krco, S., Müller, H., Li, M.-S., Schaffers, H., Lotz, V., Alvarez, F., Stiller, B., Karnouskos, S., Avessta, S., Nilsson, M.). Alfred Hofmann, then editor and now vice president at Springer, describes the challenges of creating the first OA book. “The project was difficult to realize within Springer as nobody had experience regarding OA book publishing at that time,” says Hofmann. This was before many publishers had begun to offer OA for books. But there was a definite need to support OA publication: “The Future Internet Assembly series was a sequence of conferences sponsored by the European Community, which already at that time advocated OA publication of research results developed with EC-sponsored activities,” explains Hofmann. Alfred Hofmann: Vice President, Springer “Open access is a requirement for all projects funded by Horizon 2020 […] so it was imperative to use the open access model in order to obtain a sufficient large number and high quality contributions from authors,” added Anastasius Gavras, one of the contributing editors ...
Source: BioMed Central Blog - Category: General Medicine Authors: Tags: Open Access Publishing open access books Source Type: blogs