currentsinbiology:

Handful of Biologists Went Rogue and Published Directly to Internet

On Feb. 29, Carol Greider of Johns Hopkins University became the third Nobel Prize laureate biologist in a month to do something long considered taboo among biomedical researchers: She posted a report of her recent discoveries to a publicly accessible website, bioRxiv, before submitting it to a scholarly journal to review for “official’’ publication.

It
was a small act of information age defiance, and perhaps also a bit of a
throwback, somewhat analogous to Stephen King’s 2000 self-publishing an
e-book or Radiohead’s 2007 release of a download-only record without a
label. To commemorate it, she tweeted the website’s confirmation under
the hashtag #ASAPbio, a newly coined rallying cry of a cadre of
biologists who say they want to speed science by making a key change in
the way it is published.