Kevin Davies of Bio-IT World has interviewed Steven Salzberg, our 2013 Benjamin Franklin Award laureate. Here's an excerpt:

"I'm a big supporter of open access and have been a big fan since the beginning. I know [past Franklin laureates] Mike and Jonathan Eisen very well – Jonathan and I had offices next to each other for several years at TIGR. I watched the Public Library of Science grow since its first days. And I supported Biomed Central and published papers in the very first year of Genome Biology, their first and still probably their best genomics journal. So I publish as much as I can in open access journals – the only exceptions I make are, I have to admit, are for Nature and Science and the other Nature journals. It's hard to ignore when someone is reaching a big audience – you want your papers to be read by a lot of people. Fortunately, because of the NIH policy, the papers at Nature and Science are also made open access within a year. I would rather it be immediate; I'm very sympathetic to that and support that [movement] as much as I can.

"I think we're going to win. Open access is a current battle but I have no doubt that the scientists are going to win this battle. The fact is that we write the papers, we review the papers, we actually edit the papers and the publishers do very little. Their old model, which they are clinging to and fighting tooth-and-nail, is going to be replaced by open access at some point. It's just a matter of when."

SOURCE

http://www.bio-itworld.com/2013/3/14/microbial-genomes-open-access-flu-shots-gene-patents.html