Open Access and No End

" ... Randy Schekman is an outspoken spirit. Even before he received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2013, he made sure that he, or rather his cause, was a topic of wide discussion – open access and 'his' platform: eLife. In the summer of 2011, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) announced that Randy Schekman would become the Chief Editor of a new journal: a joint project from the HHMI, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust. Professor Schekman explained the need for the project in this way: “It is my strong feeling that there is a need for a scientific journal at the very high end that is run by active practising scientists embedded in an academic environment.' 2012 saw the launch of 'eLife', with, according to media reports, a registered capital of 15 million US dollars. So far so good.  At the end of 2013 Schekman went a step further with an article, published in the Guardian to wide acclaim, that could easily have been construed as a challenge to the traditional scientific publishers: 'How journals like Nature, Cell and Science are damaging science'. In it Schekman argued that the major publishers kept the number of articles published artificially low and also that they selected articles according to how prestigious they were and not on account of the scientific knowledge they contained. He then went one step further by warning that the current practice of scientific publication led to unscientific work being published ..."