Category Archives: open access

Another paper ready for open review: comparative ChIP-seq and RNA-seq in Drosophila embryos

By Michael Eisen | Published: March 1, 2013

As I wrote about for our last paper, I hate the way scientific publishing works today, especially the insane delays (average is about 9 months) between when a lab is ready to share its work and when the work is actually available. So, from now on we are going to post all of our papers online when […]

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No celebrations here: why the White House public access policy is bad for open access

By Michael Eisen | Published: February 24, 2013

I am taking a lot of flak from my friends in the open access community about my sour response to the White House’s statement on public access to papers arising from federally-funded scientific research. While virtually everyone in the open access movement is calling for “celebration” of this “landmark” event, I see a huge missed […]

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Please review our new paper: Sequencing mRNA from cryo-sliced Drosophila embryos to determine genome-wide spatial patterns of gene expression

By Michael Eisen | Published: February 19, 2013

It’s no secret to people who read this blog that I hate the way scientific publishing works today. Most of my efforts in this domain have focused on removing barriers to the access and reuse of published papers. But there are other things that are broken with the way scientists communicate with each other, and […]

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For patents, against open access: The sad state of university leadership

By Michael Eisen | Published: February 15, 2013

Quick. Name a leader of a major research university who has taken a courageous stand on any important issue in the last decade. I know they’re out there. They must be. But I can’t think of one. Instead, I’m left dumfounded reading this amicus brief filed in a case – Bowman v. Monsanto – about […]

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The Association of American Publishers are a bunch of complete and total fu*kheads

By Michael Eisen | Published: February 15, 2013

It didn’t take long following the introduction of the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act of 2013 (FASTR) for Dr. Evil The Association of American Publishers to respond. As if trying to outdo themselves, this latest anti-open access screed contains more misleading statements and outright lies than their previous efforts to undermine public […]

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How academia betrayed and continues to betray Aaron Swartz

By Michael Eisen | Published: January 22, 2013

As news spread last week that digital rights activist Aaron Swartz had killed himself ahead of a federal trial on charges that he illegally downloaded a large database of scholarly articles with the intent to freely disseminate its contents, thousands of academics began posting free copies of their work online, coalescing around the Twitter hashtag […]

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The triumph of fake open access

By Michael Eisen | Published: May 23, 2012

It’s been a heady day for “open access”. A petition urging the Obama administration to extend the NIH’s public access policy to other government agencies blew past the halfway point in its goal to gather 25,000 signatures. And the faculty senate at UCSF voted to approve an “open access” policy that would “require” its faculty to […]

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What the UC “open access” policy should say

By Michael Eisen | Published: May 3, 2012

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. […]

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20 years of cowardice: the pathetic response of American universities to the crisis in scholarly publishing

By Michael Eisen | Published: May 1, 2012

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 […]

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The weak prescriptions in Harvard’s open-access letter and how I’d fix them

By Michael Eisen | Published: April 24, 2012

Much is being made of a recent letter from Harvard’s Faculty Advisory Council on the Library to the campus community announcing their conclusion that: major periodical subscriptions, especially to electronic journals published by historically key providers, cannot be sustained: continuing these subscriptions on their current footing is financially untenable Judging from many of the responses, people seem […]

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