Category Archives: open access

Elsevier is tricking authors into surrendering their rights

By Michael Eisen | Published: May 24, 2016

A recent post on the GOAL mailing list by Heather Morrison alerted me to the following sneaky aspect of Elsevier’s “open access” publishing practices. To put it simply, Elsevier have distorted the widely recognized concept of open access, in which authors retain copyright in their work and give others permission to reuse it, and where publishers are a […]

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PLOS, open access and scientific societies

By Michael Eisen | Published: March 21, 2016

Several people have noted that, in my previous post dealing with PLOS’s business, I didn’t address a point that came up in a number of threads regarding the relative virtues of PLOS and scientific societies – the basic point being that people should publish in society journals because they do good things with the money (run meetings, […]

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On pastrami and the business of PLOS

By Michael Eisen | Published: March 20, 2016

Last week my friend Andy Kern (a population geneticist at Rutgers) went on a bit of a bender on Twitter prompted by his discovery of PLOS’s IRS Form 990 – the annual required financial filing of non-profit corporations in the United States. You can read his string of tweets and my responses, but the gist […]

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I’m Excited! A Post Pre-Print-Posting-Powwow Post

By Michael Eisen | Published: February 18, 2016

I just got back from attending a meeting organized by a new group called ASAPbio whose mission is to promote the use of pre-prints in biology. I should start by saying that I am a big believer in this mission. I have been working for two decades to convince biomedical researchers that the Internet can be more than […]

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Coupling Pre-Prints and Post-Publication Peer Review for Fast, Cheap, Fair, and Effective Science Publishing

By Michael Eisen | Published: January 21, 2016

Leslie Vosshall and I have written the following white paper as a prelude to the upcoming ASAP Bio meeting in February aimed at promoting pre-print use in biomedicine. We would greatly value any comments, questions or concerns you have about the piece or what we are proposing. [PDF Version] Coupling Pre-Prints and Post-Publication Peer Review for […]

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The current system of scholarly publishing is the real infringement of academic freedom

By Michael Eisen | Published: December 16, 2015

Rick Anderson has a piece on “Open Access and Academic Freedom” at Inside Higher Ed arguing the open access policies being put into place by many research funders and some universities that require authors to make their work available under open licenses (most commonly Creative Commons’ CC-BY) are a violation of academic freedom and should be […]

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The New York Times’ serial open access slimer Gina Kolata has a clear conflict of interest

By Michael Eisen | Published: October 17, 2015

Yesterday the Gina Kolata published a story in the New York Times about the fact that many clinical studies are not published. This is a serious problem and it’s a good thing that it is being brought to light. But her article contains a weird section in which a researcher at the University of Florida explains […]

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The Mission Bay Manifesto on Science Publishing

By Michael Eisen | Published: October 1, 2015

Earlier this week I gave a seminar at UCSF. In addition to my usual scientific spiel, I decided to end my talk with a proposal to UCSF faculty for action that could take make scholarly communication better. This is something I used to do a lot, but have mostly stopped doing since my entreaties rarely produce tangible […]

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Wikipeevedia

By Michael Eisen | Published: September 23, 2015

A couple of weeks ago I unintentionally set off a bit of a firestorm regarding Wikipedia, Elsevier and open access. I was scanning my Twitter feed, as one does, and came upon a link to an Elsevier press release: Elsevier access donations help Wikipedia editors improve science articles: With free access to ScienceDirect, top editors can ensure that […]

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Thoughts on Ron Vale’s ‘Accelerating Scientific Publication in Biology’

By Michael Eisen | Published: July 15, 2015

Ron Vale has posted a really interesting piece on BioRxiv arguing for changes in scientific publishing. The piece is part data analysis, examining differences in publishing in several journals and among UCSF graduate students from 1980 to today, and part perspective, calling for the adoption of a culture of “pre-prints” in biology, and the expanded […]

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