Open Access and No End | The Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings

Randy Schekman’s role as an open access advocate and publishing boycotter The term “open access” basically means free public access to research papers. The open access movement formed in the early 1990s as university libraries faced budget cuts and new technology seemed to offer a different way forward. People began to argue that since academic research and publishing was publicly funded, surely the public should have free online access to the papers being published as a result. 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.