Research publishing: Taking the online medicine | The Economist

"David O’Connor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison was announcing his decision on February 14th to post online data from his laboratory’s latest experiment. He and his team had infected macaques with the Zika virus and were recording the concentrations of virus in the monkeys’ bodily fluids every day. Researchers know that Zika is transmitted principally by infected mosquitoes. But if the virus appears in saliva and urine then these might also be sources of infection.  Dr O’Connor and his colleagues published their results every day to a publicly accessible website. They hoped this would be useful to others working on the disease and, ultimately, to health authorities striving to contain it. They did not expect to garner much attention. But they did ..."