Honoring the 2023 Nobel Laureates with free access to their research

Editor's note: This article will be continually updated with information about the newly announced Nobel Prize winners and access to their research.

This week, select scientists from around the world will receive the "magic call." Winning the Nobel Prize is a crowning achievement that represents decades of probing research that has had a profound impact on humanity. Their contributions reinforce the role of research as a driver of progress.

Confidence in research is not something we can take for granted, of course. Science is constantly being challenged by controversies and misinformation. The Nobel Prize can help restore this confidence. The Laureates are among the millions of researchers worldwide who collaborate across borders and disciplines, sharing their diverse perspectives to solve complex problems. The prize also serves as a reminder of the importance of peer-reviewed research that withstands scrutiny.

At Elsevier, we're proud to highlight that most of the Nobel Laureates in science and economics have published in our journals and books — 217 out of 218 since the year 2000, according to a Scopus analysis — and some have also served as editors, editorial board members or reviewers.

The rigor and integrity they bring to their work can help reinforce the confidence in research that is so important to societal progress.

To honor this year’s Nobel Laureates and the community that made their breakthroughs possible, we are bringing together a selection of their most cited papers published with Elsevier. Their work will, in turn, empower today’s scientists to make further discoveries.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine(opens in new tab/window) was awarded jointly to jointly to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman "for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19."

The discoveries these two scientists made played a critical role in developing effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19. Their findings changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system, contributing to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times.

Commenting on the award, Peter Lee, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Immunity said,

"The Immunity article “Suppression of RNA recognition by Toll-like receptors: The impact of nucleoside modification and the evolutionary origin of RNA” referenced both in the Nobel Prize press release and in subsequent coverage of the prize, reported the critical conceptual breakthrough that enabled the development of mRNA vaccines. We at Cell Press and at Elsevier are proud to be the venue to communicate this important finding and would like to celebrate our authors on their monumental accomplishment.

"We wholeheartedly congratulate Drs. Karikó and Weissman for the well-deserved Nobel Prize. Their work has already saved countless lives during the pandemic and will continue to revolutionize the prevention and treatment of diseases. This prize highlights the importance of understanding fundamental science, which leads to profound impact on human well-being."

Nobel Prize in Physics

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics (opens in new tab/window)was awarded jointly to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L'Huillier. The award recognizes their work in exploring the world of electrons inside atoms and molecules, demonstrating a way to create extremely short pulses of light that can be used to measure the rapid processes in which electrons move or change energy.

Eva Olsson, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics commented: “We can now open the door to the world of electrons. Attosecond physics gives us the opportunity to understand mechanisms that are governed by electrons. The next step will be utilising them."

David Clary, Editor of the Elsevier journal Chemical Physics Impact, commented:

Chemical physicists will be delighted by the award of the 2023 Nobel Prize for Physics to three pioneers of attosecond spectroscopy. Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L'Huillier developed new experimental methods that enable electron dynamics to be followed on a timescale of one billionth of a billionth of a second. The early ground-breaking work of these Nobel Laureates involved examining the effects of intense laser pulses on simple atomic gases but their methods are now having wide applications to the ultrafast study of liquids, metals and even biological systems. In the great tradition of chemical physics, their experimental results have been backed up by theoreticians whose calculations using the time-dependent Schrödinger equation have helped to explain the details of the motion of electrons on an attosecond timescale.

The previous Nobel Prize related to this work was the 1999 award for Chemistry to Ahmed Zewail who was then the Editor of the Elsevier journal Chemical Physics Letters. Zewail pioneered the study of the dynamics of atoms and molecules on a femtosecond timescale, one thousand times longer than the 2023 Prize for attosecond breakthroughs.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (opens in new tab/window)was awarded to Moungi G. Bawendi, Louis E. Brus and Alexei I. Ekimov for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots. These nanoparticles are so tiny that their size determines their properties. They are the smallest components of nanotechnology, used in televisions and LED lamps, and can also guide surgeons when they remove tumour tissue, among many other things.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

The  Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2023 was awarded to Claudia Goldin,(opens in new tab/window) who provided the first comprehensive account of women’s earnings and labour market participation through the centuries. Her research reveals the causes of change, as well as the main sources of the remaining gender gap.

Much of this information came from the Nobel Prize website(opens in new tab/window).