The New York Times
Amy Harmon
March 15, 2016
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.
