NY Times: “Handful of Biologists Went Rogue and Published Directly to Internet”

From The NY Times:

On Feb. 29, Carol Greider of Johns Hopkins University became the third Nobel Prize laureate biologist in a month to do something long considered taboo among biomedical researchers: She posted a report of her recent discoveries to a publicly accessible website, bioRxiv, before submitting it to a scholarly journal to review for “official’’ publication.

It was a small act of information age defiance, and perhaps also a bit of a throwback, somewhat analogous to Stephen King’s 2000 self-publishing an e-book or Radiohead’s 2007 release of a download-only record without a label. To commemorate it, she tweeted the website’s confirmation under the hashtag #ASAPbio, a newly coined rallying cry of a cadre of biologists who say they want to speed science by making a key change in the way it is published.

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Unlike physicists, for whom preprints became a default method of communicating discoveries in the 1990s, biomedical researchers typically wait more than six months to disseminate their work while they submit it — on an exclusive basis — to the most prestigious journal they think might accept it for publication. If, as is often the case, it is rejected, they try another journal.

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Note: infoDOCKET Friend and Associate Dean for Collections and Scholarly Communication in the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah points out on Twitter:

“Handful of Biologists Went Rogue”? Biologists have been submitting to #biorXiv since 2013 — almost 3000 ms so far. https://t.co/5ZPplB3pS4

— Rick Anderson (@Looptopper) March 15, 2016

Rick also pointed out to us that bioRxiv has a relationship with nine journals for submission direct from the database. This service was announced three months ago.

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