Author Archives: Michael Eisen

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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NIH Director Francis Collins’ ridiculous “We would have had an Ebola vaccine if the NIH were fully funded” meme

By Michael Eisen | Published: October 13, 2014

Almost as soon as the African Ebola epidemic hit the headlines, NIH Director Francis Collins was making the rounds arguing that we would have had an Ebola vaccine by now, if only Congress hadn’t slashed the NIH budget. Lest you think I’m taking his words out of context, here is what he said to a House Energy […]

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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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Yoshiki Sasai and the deadly consequences of science misconduct witchhunts

By Michael Eisen | Published: August 5, 2014

People who know me or read my blog will know that, in 1987, my father, a scientist at the NIH, killed himself after a member of his lab committed scientific fraud and he got caught up in the investigation. So I found the news this morning that Yoshiki Sasai, a Japanese stem cell scientist, committed suicide […]

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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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On Nicholas Wade and the blurring of boundaries between science and fantasy

By Michael Eisen | Published: June 4, 2014

I just finished reading Nicholas Wade’s “A Troublesome Inheritance”, his latest effort to explain all of his personal racial prejudices in the light of recent human evolution. In this book he sets out to convince readers that many aspects of modern society – the English capacity for industrialization, Jewish intelligence, the inability to establish democratic […]

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Seeking a postdoctoral fellow hellbent on understanding how transcriptional enhancers work

By Michael Eisen | Published: May 19, 2014

Michael Eisen’s lab in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at The University of California Berkeley and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute is seeking a talented, ambitious and hard-driving postdoctoral fellow to work on one of the major unsolved problems in molecular biology: how the transcriptional enhancers that control pattern gene expression during animal […]

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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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On anonymity in science and on Twitter

By Michael Eisen | Published: January 20, 2014

A lot of people who I interact with on Twitter, and whose blogs I read, have chosen to tweet and write under pseudonyms. This puzzled me at first, but I have come to realize that there are a LOT of good reasons for people to mask their real identities online. Anonymity allows people to express […]

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