Open and Shut?: Interview with Jean-Gabriel Bankier, President & CEO of bepress

Use the link to access the interview.  The introduction opens as follows: "Founded in 1999 by three Berkeley professors, bepress (formerly Berkeley Electronic Press) spent the first decade of its existence building up a portfolio of peer-reviewed journals — much like any scholarly publisher. In 2011, however, it  took what might seem like a surprising decision: it decided to sell all its journals to De Gruyter and reinvent itself as a technology company. Jean-Gabriel Bankier Instead of publishing journals, bepress is now focussed on developing and licensing the publishing technology it created for its earlier publishing activities, and its flagship product is a cloud-based institutional repository/publishing platform called Digital Commons. Digital Commons is currently licensed to more than 320 academic institutions, who use the software to publish over 700 journals, 94% of which are open access. This publishing activity is invariably managed by the institution’s library, and often includes the publishing of books, conference proceedings, data sets, audio-visual collections, and other digital content types too. Is this a sign of things to come: Publishers becoming technology companies and librarians becoming publishers? ..."