Nobel Laureate Randy Schekman Advocates Open Access During Event Monday

It is time to move away from print journals and toward digital publications, according to UC Berkeley’s most recent Nobel laureate, Randy Schekman, at an open access event Monday evening.

The Open Access Initiative at Berkeley, a student group that advocates free and unrestricted electronic distribution of scientific and scholarly literature, organized the workshop to provide answers to general and logistical questions about open access. The event was part of the global Open Access Week, which is now in its sixth year.

Schekman, a UC Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology who won the 2013 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, discussed the tension between commercial and public journals and the problems caused by important decisions being made by professional editors instead of participants in the research.

“The problem is that when the public — through taxes — has paid for the research, and then the journals charge readers for access to the research that they paid for, there’s something wrong there,” he said.