The independent academic publisher De Gruyter has reorganized the management of its open access business by integrating peer-reviewed open access activities more closely within Editorial activities. A separate business unit is being created to offer open access publishing services for third parties. The separate business unit will managed by Jacek Ciesielski, who has been named Vice President, Publishing Services, De Gruyter, and who will focus his talents and energy on building up the service for third-party content for which De Gruyter does not provide or organize peer review.
Mr. Ciesielski is the founder of Versita, the open access publisher that De Gruyter purchased in 2012 and renamed De Gruyter Open. He was instrumental not only in delivering impressive growth for the OA business, but also for promoting open access within De Gruyter more generally.
Dr. Anke Beck, Managing Director, De Gruyter, who manages the Editorial operations of the company, will take on the additional responsibility for the open access team that currently includes 17 managing editors publishing 17 megajournals and 40 microjournals and a large number of open access books.
Indeed, of those publishers listed in the Directory of Open Access Books, De Gruyter is the largest independent academic publisher of open access books, and more than 800 open access books are available on degruyter.com.
Eelco Ferwerda, Director of the Directory of Open Access Books and the OAPEN Foundation said, “De Gruyter has a leading role in the transition to open access in the Humanities, and has built one of the largest lists of open access books. It is great to see they are expanding their offering in this area.”
“Open access is the most challenging business model an academic publisher can provide, but De Gruyter embraced open access many years ago, and we are well-placed to meet the challenges of the changing publishing environment. The structural changes we are making will make us stronger in a very competitive market and will allow us to provide an even better service to authors and institutions,” said Dr. Beck.
