Vitek Tracz is a hero of the open access movement, and it is not hard to see why. Fifteen years ago he founded the world's first for-profit OA publisher BioMed Central (BMC), and pioneered pay-to-publish gold OA. Instead of charging readers a downstream subscription fee, BMC levies an upfront article-processing charge, or APC. By doing so it is able to cover its costs at the time of publication, and so make the papers it publishes freely available on the Internet.
Many said Tracz's approach would not work. But despite initial scepticism BMC eventually convinced other publishers that it had a sustainable business model, and so encouraged them to put their toes in the OA waters too. As such, OA advocates believe BMC was vital to the success of open access. As Peter Murray-Rust put it in 2010, "Without Vitek and BMC we would not have open access". Today Tracz has a new, more radical, mission, which he is pursuing with F1000. A Q&A with Tracz is available here: http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/the-open-access-interviews-f1000.html A commentary on the issues arising from the interview is separately available here: http://richardpoynder.co.uk/Tracz_Interview.pdf Richard Poynder
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