Molecular biologists and neuroscientists are tweeting with the hashtag #ASAPbio in protest of a system that keeps research from being shared with the public, typically for more than six months.

On Feb. 29, Carol Greider of Johns Hopkins University became the thirdNobel 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.

Source: Handful of Biologists Went Rogue and Published Directly to Internet