Open-access pioneer Randy Schekman on Plan S and disrupting scientific publishing

"Nobel laureate Randy Schekman shook up the publishing industry when he launched the open-access journal eLife in 2012.

Armed with millions in funding from three of the world’s largest private biomedical charities — the Wellcome Trust, the Max Planck Society and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute — Schekman designed the journal to compete with publishing powerhouses such as Nature, Science and Cell. (Nature’s news team is independent of its journal team and its publisher, Springer Nature.)

eLife experimented with innovative approaches such as collaborative peer review — in which reviewers work together to vet research — that caused ripples in scientific publishing.

And for the first few years, researchers could publish their work in eLife for free. That came to an end in 2017, because the journal needed more revenue streams to help it to grow...."