QuickWire: Open-Access Journal Editor Wins Nobel Prize in Medicine

Randy W. Schekman, a professor in the department of molecular and cellular medicine at the University of California at Berkeley who is one of three winners of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, is also an influential proponent of open-access scientific publishing. The Nobel committee didn’t mention it in announcing the prize, which Mr. Schekman won along with James E. Rothman, a professor of cellular biology at Yale University, and Thomas C. Südhof, a professor of molecular and cellular physiology at Stanford University, but Mr. Schekman is editor in chief of eLife, an open-access, scientist-driven journal founded in 2011 with the help of several major supporters of biomedical research, including the Wellcome Trust, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Max Planck Institute. The three researchers were recognized for separate work that “solved the mystery of how the cell organizes its transport system.”