Director of Open Access, Springer, Surrey, United Kingdom
Originally a marine geologist, Jan has worked in the publishing industry for more than 30 years. Since August 2005 he is Director of Open Access at Springer, and before that he was the publisher of the BioMed Central Group, the open access publishing house.
He was one of the small group of people who first defined the term open access: the Budapest Open Access Initiative. He was also involved in formulating the "Bethesda Statement" and "Berlin Declaration on Open Access," as well as the recent "Salvador Declaration." Before his involvement in open access, he built up a wealth of experience in publishing, especially with regard to scientific journals.
Throughout the ´90s, he was the Managing Director of Academic Press Limited in the UK. He has also held high profile positions at Macmillan Publishers where he was the Publishing Director of Nature Publishing Group and President of Nature Inc, and at the Dutch Media Group, Wegener, where he was the Managing Director of one of their newspaper titles.
Following his postgraduate study in marine geology, he started his publishing career at Elsevier in Amsterdam as Acquisitions Editor responsible for a number of books & journals publishing programmes in various disciplines. In addition to the above he has worked as a consultant within the scientific publishing and information industries.