Rebecca Skloot has an essay in today’s New York Times discussing the recent publication of the genome sequence of a widely used human cell line. Skloot, as most of you already know, wrote a book about the history this cell line - known as HeLa for Henrietta Lacks, the woman from whom they were obtained. In [...]
If you ask scientists to list words they are most afraid to hear associated with their work, I suspect “retraction” would rank high on the list. Retraction is a kind of death sentence, applied only when papers contain serious methodological errors or were tainted by fraud. So the recent retraction of a PLoS Pathogens paper [...]
It is oddly fitting that the papers describing the results of the NIH’s massive $200m ENCODE project were published in the midst of political convention season. For this was no typical scientific publication, but a carefully orchestrated spectacle, meant to justify a massive, expensive undertaking, and to convince us that we are better off now [...]
I was excited today when my Twitter stream started lighting up with links to an article titled “The Glacial Pace of Scientific Publishing: Why It Hurts Everyone and What We Can Do To Fix It“. Sounded right up my alley. I was even more excited when I clicked and saw that it was written by [...]
[The Washington Post ran a nice op-ed today from two student leaders linked to the recent public access petition campaign. I had submitted one that urges the administration to take a more agressive stance, which I am posting here.] Last weekend, a “We the People” petition calling on the Obama administration to provide free access [...]
The joint faculty senate of the ten campuses of the University of California has floated a trial balloon “open access” policy. I, of course, laud the effort to move the ball forward on open access, but the proposed policy falls short in two key ways. 1) The rights reserved by the University are too limited. [...]
When Harvard University says it can not afford something, people notice. So it was last month when a faculty committee examining the future of the university’s libraries declared that the continued growth of journal subscription fees was unsustainable, even for them. The accompanying calls for faculty action are being hailed as a major challenge to the traditional publishers [...]
There’s been a lot of media coverage of and discussion about a recent paper from Bert Vogelstein and Victor Velvulescu about the utility of whole-genome sequencing to predict disease. Using previously published data on disease occurrence in identical twins, and a relatively simple mathematical model, the authors conclude that not only isn’t sequencing very useful for [...]
The American Association of Publishers and the anti-open access DC Principles group have sent letters to both houses of Congress outlining why they oppose the Federal Research Public Access Act, which would make the results of all federally funded research publicly available. They largely trot out the same tired “not all publishers are alike, so don’t impose [...]
Late last year Elsevier and two of its allies in Congress quietly introduced a bill that would have halted the trend towards increased public access to the results of government funded research headlined by the NIH’s Public Access Policy. This brazen act, which its backers hoped would pass unnoticed in the quiet of the holidays, [...]
I'm a biologist at UC Berkeley and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. I work primarily on flies, and my research encompases evolution, development, genetics, genomics, chemical ecology and behavior. I am a strong proponent of open science, and a co-founder of the Public Library of Science. And most importantly, I am a Red Sox fan. (More about me here).
I can be reached at:
mbeisen at berkeley.edu
and @mbeisen on Twitter
