Category Archives: open access

The inevitable failure of parasitic green open access

By Michael Eisen | Published: May 25, 2015

At the now famous 2001 meeting that led to the Budapest Open Access Initiative – the first time the many different groups pushing to make scholarly literature freely available assembled – a serious rift emerged that almost shattered the open access movement in its infancy. On one side were people like me (representing the nascent Public Library of Science) and […]

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PLOS is anti-elitist! PLOS is elitist! The weird world of open access journalism.

By Michael Eisen | Published: December 25, 2014

In 2005 I submitted an essay about science publishing to a political magazine. I got a polite reply back saying that the article was interesting and the issue important but that my approach wasn’t right for them. My piece was too straightforward. Too persuasive. They preferred articles that had a simple “hook” and, most importantly, were “counterintuitive”. Zoom […]

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Is Nature’s “free to view” a magnanimous gesture or a cynical ploy?

By Michael Eisen | Published: December 1, 2014

Macmillan, the publisher of Nature and 48 other Nature Publishing Group (NPG) journals, announced today that all research papers published in these journals would be “made free to read in a proprietary screen-view format that can be annotated but not copied, printed or downloaded”. If you believe, as I do, that paywalls that restrict the free […]

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Contrary to what you read in Nature, Open Access has not caused the growth in science publishing

By Michael Eisen | Published: November 27, 2014

I wasn’t planning on spending my Thanksgiving delving into PubMed statistics to refute yet another bogus claim about open access publishing. But being a vegan, I didn’t really have much else to do anyway. So… The newest Nature has an Op-Ed from Martijn Arns, a brain researcher in the Netherlands with a title I couldn’t […]

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Meet Kent Anderson, anti-#openaccess campaigner, publisher of Science

By Michael Eisen | Published: August 7, 2014

The news that the American Association for the Advancement of Science named Kent Anderson as its new Publisher was met with shock and widespread derision by myself and other supporters of open access publishing. In the often mocking banter about this hire, a number of people wondered what we were getting all worked up about. So, […]

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The DOE’s public access policy sells out the public

By Michael Eisen | Published: August 4, 2014

Yesterday the Department of Energy became one of the first federal agencies to announce its plan to comply with a 2013 White Houses directive ordering federal agencies to provide the public with access to the results of research that they fund. Here are the main features: DOE will host a centralized database of metadata (title, authors) The full-text of […]

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Why I, a founder of PLOS, am forsaking open access

By Michael Eisen | Published: April 1, 2014

PLEASE NOTE BEFORE YOU READ THIS THAT IT WAS WRITTEN FOR APRIL FOOLS DAY!!! I co-founded the Public Library of Science (PLOS) in 2002 because I believed deeply that the open access publishing model PLOS espoused and has come to dominate was good for science, scientists and the public.  Over the past decade open access […]

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FIRST of all, THIS is why you should never trust publishers

By Michael Eisen | Published: March 12, 2014

When President Obama announced last year that he was requiring federal agencies that fund science to develop policies to make papers arising from the work they publish freely available to the public, major subscription-based publishers responded in a generally favorable manner – reflecting the extent to which they had drawn the White House back from more aggressive […]

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Beall’s Litter

By Michael Eisen | Published: December 14, 2013

Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado Denver, has come to some fame in science publication circles for highlighting the growing number of “predatory” open access publishers and curating a list of them. His work has provided a useful service to people seeking to navigate the sometimes confusing array of new journals – […]

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The impact of Randy Schekman abandoning Science and Nature and Cell

By Michael Eisen | Published: December 10, 2013

Recipients of this year’s Nobel Prizes converge this week on Stockholm to receive their medals, dine with the King and Queen, and be treated like the scientific royalty they have become. For most this time is, understandably, about them and their work. So, bravo to my Berkeley colleague Randy Schekman – one of this year’s […]

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