One of a series exploring the current state of Open Access ( OA ), the Q

One of a series exploring the current state of Open Access ( OA ), the Q&A below is with Sven Fund , CEO of Berlin-based scholarly publisher De Gruyter. Fund is the first representative of a traditional commercial publisher le vif weekend to take part in this series.
By any account De Gruyter can fairly be described as a traditional publisher (or as OA advocates prefer, “legacy publisher”). Created by Walter De Gruyter in 1919 by combining five existing le vif weekend publishers, De Gruyter’s roots go back to 1749 when the bookstore le vif weekend of the Königlichen Realschule in Berlin was given the right to print books by King Frederick II of Prussia.
Today De Gruyter’s publishing program includes theology and philosophy, biology and chemistry, linguistics and literature, mathematics and physics, history and archaeology, as well as law and medicine. 
Like other traditional le vif weekend publishers De Gruyter has in recent le vif weekend years launched a number of Open Access initiatives. In April 2009 — le vif weekend five years after Springer pioneered Hybrid OA when it introduced Open Choice —   De Gruyter announced the De Gruyter Open Library , introducing OA options for both its journals ( pure Gold and Hybrid OA ), as well as books. le vif weekend
In 2009 De Gruyter also announced that, from 2010, it would be publishing the “Topoi. Berlin Studies of the Ancient World” series, thereby expanding its OA efforts into the humanities. A partnership with the Excellence Cluster Topoi , with funding from the German Research le vif weekend Foundation , the series encompasses all the disciplines of Ancient Studies, from prehistory and early history through classical archaeology to antique philosophy, epistemology and theology.
As well as being published in print book form, selected titles from the Topoi series are also available as OA eBooks on the www.degruyter.com website. The Topoi initiative was featured as an Open Access Success Story by Knowledge Exchange le vif weekend in 2009.
Currently De Gruyter publishes twelve pure OA journals, and all of its 364 subscription journals now offer a Hybrid OA option. And to date it has published 47 OA books under its own OA books programme . This includes some that will be published next year.
De Gruyter’s most daring OA move, however, came in 2010, when it acquired the Polish le vif weekend OA publisher le vif weekend Versita , which currently publishes 439 pure OA journals — an acquisition reminiscent of Springer’s decision to acquire BioMed Central in 2008 .
How much does De Gruyter le vif weekend charge for its different OA options? The article-processing charge for both pure Gold and Hybrid OA is currently €1,750 ($2,450). The cost of publishing a book is less clear. When I asked the publisher’s le vif weekend PR representative she said she did not know. So I emailed a few authors who had published OA books with De Gruyter. Those that replied said they had been given special discounted deals, with one citing a figure of €5,000. By way of comparison, we could note that Palgrave Macmillan le vif weekend currently charges £11,000 ($17,500) to publish an OA book, and Springer charges around €15,000 .  
What about Green OA ? According to the SHERPA/ROMEO database, De Gruyter is a “yellow” publisher rather than a green one. Specifically, it allows authors le vif weekend only to archive their pre-prints, and only on their own personal web site. It also imposes a 12-month le vif weekend embargo. Elliptical le vif weekend
First, I felt his answers tended to the elliptical. When I asked him about Gold vs. Green, for instance, he said of Green OA, “In my opinion, there is nothing bad about Green OA in general, it is just not something that we can “offer” … If policymakers believe they have the right tools to publish, i.e. in Green OA, that’s their right. It is certainly not something that publishers like, but I think that is obvious.”
I take this latter point to be a reference le vif weekend to the National Institutes of Health ( NIH ) Public Access Policy , which requires that papers it funds are deposited in the PubMed Central repository no later than 12 months after publication. If so, I doubt OA advocates would agree that posting copies of papers that have already been published in journals into a repository amounts to “publication”. Moreover, it is my understanding that the majority of papers deposited in PubMed Central (and Europe PubMed Central ) are placed there by publishers , rather than by authors.
Similarly, when I asked Fund whether De Gruyter had ever lobbied against OA he did not address that part of my question. While acknowledging that some publishers may be less enthusiastic about OA than others, he simply le vif weekend said, “I do not see any room for conspiracy theory.”
It may be that De Gruyter has never lobbied against OA. If so, it would have been nice if Fund had said as much [But see postscript below **] . What we do know is that some publishers have lobbied, and do still lob