Zuckerberg, Chan's Philanthropy Backs Effort to Change Scientific Publishing

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the philanthropic investment vehicle created by Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, MD, will fund an effort to allow biologists to share drafts of papers before they are published in peer-reviewed scientific journals like Nature or Science. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Cori Bargmann, the president of Chan Zuckerberg’s science efforts, says in a blog post that the effort could “dramatically accelerate the pace of discovery, and, in turn, our understanding of health and disease.” In a post on Facebook, Zuckerberg writes: "If we're going to cure all disease in our children's lifetime, we need to speed up science. One thing that slows us down today is that it can take a year or longer to publish research in a scientific journal."