Biography

Vitek studied Mathematics in Warsaw and Jerusalem and Film making in The Slade School of Fine Art in London. He was then a Fellow in the Department of Art History in University of Essex, followed by a period of making documentaries independently and in a production company he founded, Medi-Cine. After making a feature film in Israel he moved into medical publishing, founding Gower Medical Publishing, where, in addition to many highly illustrated medical atlases, he published a number of medical textbook, including the leading textbook in Immunology by Charles Janeway. This was followed by medical journals and the invention of new literature review journal format “Current Opinion in…” initially in Medicine and then in Biology, as well is the leading research journal “Current Biology”. Vitek then went on to create one of the first major community sites in the very early days of the Web – BioMedNet. After moving much of his publishing activity to the Web, Vitek proposed to the NIH a new publishing scheme now known as Open Access, which led to the launch of PubMed Central by NIH and his own new publishing site “BioMed Central”. In addition to the above Vitek was the founder of TelMap, the first navigation service operating on mobile phones; Current Drugs, which published a database of pharmacologically active compounds “Investigational Drugs Database -IDdb”; Web of Stories, a video collection of life stories of some major figures from science and arts; F1000 Research which developed a new way to publish original research, initially in Biology and Medicine; Faculty Opinions a new way of qualitatively evaluating research articles by a large Faculty of experts in Biology and Medicine and Sciwheel a set of software tools to help researchers write research articles and manage references and collaborations.

Currently Vitek operates The Sciencenow Group https://sciencenow.com the central activity of which is is Web of Stories, the site where people who have influenced the world we live in or who have simply led exciting and interesting lives tell their story.