From the Chronicle of Higher Education.
By Jennifer Howard
Dear publishers,
Boycotts, public disagreements, stalled antipiracy and anti-public-access bills: It's been an interesting time for you lately.
Are you nervous? Some of you should be. Not because your business models are on the verge of collapse—commercial academic publishers are unlikely to suffer a mass extinction soon—but because of how researchers themselves are changing. One scholar described it to me as an Academic Spring, a sense of revolution in the air...
Now some of the most prominent supporters of medical and scientific research, including the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Wellcome Trust, have thrown their reputations and their money behind another open-access journal,eLife. It hopes to attract top-flight papers that might otherwise go to commercially run journals likeCellandNature.
