Nobel-Worthy Open Access Research

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-10-26

Summary:

"French physicist and 2012 Nobel Prize winner Serge Haroche is no stranger to Open Access. He has long shared his research via the open access pre-print repository, arXiv, that his field had the wisdom to create. The physics community boasts a well-established practice of opening up its data to facilitate and accelerate the research of all. But, as some of this year’s other Nobel laureates prove, biology and chemistry are not bereft of an open access reflex, either. Tomorrow night in Paris, you’ll get the chance to strengthen yours... In 1962, Dr. Gurdon, of the Gurdon Institute (Cambridge, UK), was the first to successfully clone an animal—a frog—by transferring the nucleus of a mature cell into an egg whose own nucleus had been removed. The fact that a healthy tadpole was born of this transfer showed that the adult nucleus still contained all the instructions necessary for development.

In an article published last year in PLOS Biology, Gurdon took the understanding of this process further, showing that, due to small differences in the genome, the cell nucleus of one species is unable to drive development of the egg of a distantly related species... Gurdon’s fellow Nobel Laureate, Shinya Yamanaka, of Kyoto University and the Gladstone Institutes (San Francisco, USA), allowed the field to move closer to human therapeutic applications... Over the last three years, Dr. Yamanaka has published his work in open access journal PLOS ONE nine times. According to the publisher, his influential paper presenting this method of reprogramming adult cells, with its great potential for clinical applications, has been viewedover 16,000 times. Thousands and thousands of opportunities for this important information to be shared. 2012’s winners in the Medicine or Physiology category were not the only ones to share their findings freely with the research community and the world. Brian Kobilka of the Stanford University School of Medicine, one of this year’s laureates in Chemistry, also published in PLOS ONE, a mere week before the announcement of his award... Should it be any surprise that Nobel-level scientists see value in associating themselves with Open Access publishing? Hardly. Especially given that one of the three founders of the groundbreaking PLOS, Harold Varmus, is himself one: Varmus shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. There are still kinks in the system that need to be worked out, but to do so should not take a Nobel-worthy effort. What it will require is thoughtful examination of research funding and the possible economic models for Open Access, as well as discussion among as many players as possible concerned with the sharing of research results.  You can be part of this discussion, tomorrow night at UNESCO, as part of International Open Access Week. MyScienceWork invites you to participate in this event by learning about the impact of Open Access publishing from invited speakers, all leaders in the movement and staying for a glass of wine and friendly discussion at the end..."

Link:

http://blog.mysciencework.com/en/2012/10/24/nobel-worthy-open-access-research.html

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.medicine oa.biology oa.new oa.gold oa.comment oa.advocacy oa.plos oa.physics oa.france oa.chemistry oa.biomedicine oa.oa_week oa.nobel_prize oa.impact oa.journals

Date tagged:

10/26/2012, 10:45

Date published:

10/26/2012, 06:45