Jan Velterop

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Johannes (Jan) Josephus Marinus Velterop (born March 18, 1949) is a science publisher. Born in The Hague, The Netherlands, he was originally a marine geologist and became a science publisher in the mid 1970s. He 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. After Academic Press he 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.

In 2005 he joined Springer Science+Business Media as Director of Open Access, residing in Guildford, UK. Springer is the first mainstream STM (Science, Technology, Medicine) publisher to offer open access as an option for virtually all its scientific and scholarly journals.

At the end of March, 2008, he left Springer ^[1] to become CEO of Knewco, a company that uses semantic technology to accelerate scientific discovery.