Coffee Table Science

Remember the year 2012, when all we could hear from the smartphone industry was the on-going litigation between Apple and Samsung. Well, after a recent move from Illumina, the world’s largest next generation sequencing instrument provider, we can expect 2016 to be a similar year of litigation in the genomics industry. Except that unlike Apple’s opponent Samsung, who were busy selling smartphones around the world, Illumina’s opponent is a young company based in UK, Oxford Nanopore Technologies just venturing out in the real world. To understand, why Illumina would take such a step, we first need to go back in time, where all this began. Back in 2003, with the then available method of sequencing (Sanger Sequencing), it took the researchers 13 years and $2.7 billion to publish the Human Genome. At this rate, sequencing would be the luxury of just a few people on the planet and would eventually die. To harness the potential of the genetics and make the genome “the transformative textbook o…

On the 28th of October 2015, Judge Robert Sweet in his ruling at the New York district court declared that the website www.sci-hub.org be blocked with immediate effect and managed to stop hundreds and thousands of researchers and science enthusiasts from accessing the holy grail of today’s science, the research paper.
What should be a simple means to communicate to the world one’s research findings, has become a currency of some sort. A ticket to a researcher’s professional success, a magnet for an investigator to attract funding for his lab and the elusive piece of the puzzle that the publishing group can hold you ransom for, until you cough up some good cash ($30 or above for a single article and thousands of dollars for a bundled annual subscription)
What Judge Sweet termed as a “disservice (to) public interest”, is actually a small website that allows you access to scientific research, old and new, and for free. Sci- Hub. Org, started in 2011, as a trusted place to access research …