Scientists go rogue by publishing first on Net

New York

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 K…