Come next year, Randy Schekman will no longer be at the helm of eLife, the journal he launched six years ago, according to a statement. The Nobel laureate will instead devote his efforts to Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s, an organization that is developing research strategies for diagnostics, biomarkers, and therapies.
Schekman, a cell and molecular biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, has been a vocal critic of traditional science publishing for years, even vowing to boycott the high-profile journals where he had reported his Nobel-winning work on vesicle trafficking. Before starting eLife, he served as the editor-in-chief of PNAS. When the opportunity came in 2012 to start fresh with a new publication, Schekman decided to change the way the process was done—making peer reviewers collaborate, using working scientists as editors, shortening the time to publication, and presenting all papers open access. At ...