Open Access Research | Noble Prize Winner Says Avoid Major Journals TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics

"As the row over takedown notices from academic publisher Elsevier already detailed in TeleRead continues to mushroom, a different perspective on the whole issue of open access research publication has surfaced from Randy Schekman, 'investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California at Berkeley. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2013.' Writing in the UK Guardian under the headline 'How journals like Nature, Cell and Science are damaging science,' Schekman announced that he has 'now committed my lab to avoiding' what he styles these 'luxury journals,' while encouraging his academic peers 'to do likewise' in favor of 'the new breed of open-access journals that are free for anybody to read.' Schekman’s take on this is rather different from those who are tackling takedown notices. His argument is rather that the 'distorting incentives' involved in the production of these major journals mean that they do not always publish research of the quality you’d expect from such brands ..."