Jan Velterop

Johannes (Jan) Josephus Marinus Velterop (born 18 March 1949) is a science publisher.^[2][3]

Jan Velterop
Born	Johannes Josephus Marinus Velterop (1949-03-18) 18 March 1949 (age 76) The Hague, Netherlands
Known for	Budapest Open Access Initiative Nanopublication[1]
Scientific career
Fields	Academic publishing Open access
Institutions	Elsevier Academic Press BioMed Central Nature Publishing Group Springer Science+Business Media De Twentsche Courant Tubantia Knewco Inc. AQnowledge
Website	theparachute.blogspot.co.uk

Education

Born in The Hague, Netherlands, he was originally a marine geophysicist and became a science publisher in the mid-1970s.

Career

Velterop started his publishing career at Elsevier in Amsterdam. After a few years out of the scientific field as the director of the Dutch regional newspaper De Twentsche Courant, he returned to international science publishing at Academic Press in London. He next joined Nature as director for a short while, but moved quickly on to help get BioMed Central, the first commercial open access science publisher, off the ground.

Velterop was one of the small group of people who first defined "open access" in 2001 in Budapest, a meeting resulting in the Budapest Open Access Initiative^[4]

In 2005 he joined Springer Science+Business Media in the United Kingdom as Director of Open Access.

At the end of March 2008 he left Springer ^[5] to help further develop semantic approaches to accelerate scientific discovery. Since January 2009 he is involved in the Concept Web Alliance^[6] as one of the initiators. He lives in Guildford, UK. He is an active advocate of open access and of the use of microattribution (the hallmark of so-called "nanopublications").^[1][7]

Velterop also serves on the Advisory Boards of several initiatives and companies, such as Knowledge Unlatched and ScienceOpen.