Category Archives: open access

Plagiarist or Puppet? US Rep. Carolyn Maloney’s reprehensible defense of Elsevier’s Research Works Act

By Michael Eisen | Published: January 13, 2012

There has been lots of activity this week surrounding the “Research Works Act“, a bill introduced in the US House of Representatives that seeks to end the NIH’s Public Access Policy. Despite the flurry of attention to the bill, its authors – Reps Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Darrell Issa (R-CA) have remained silent (save a […]

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Protect public access to taxpayer funded research

By Michael Eisen | Published: January 10, 2012

I have an op-ed out today in the New York Times prompted by a new effort by publishers to restrict public access to the results of publicly-funded scientific research. If you’re as incensed by this as I am, you have several important opportunities to weigh in. Help protect the NIH’s Public Access Policy in Congress If […]

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Our scientific societies need to quit the Association of American Publishers

By Michael Eisen | Published: January 7, 2012

By coming out in favor of the odious Research Works Act, which would end the NIH’s Public Access Policy, the American Association of Publishers has proven, once again, that it is eager to place its narrow interests ahead of those of the scientific community and public. It should come as now surprise that publishing behemoths […]

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Elsevier-funded NY Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney Wants to Deny Americans Access to Taxpayer Funded Research

By Michael Eisen | Published: January 5, 2012

In 2008, under bipartisan pressure from Congress to ensure that all Americans would be able to access the results of taxpayer-funded biomedical research, the US National Institutes of Health instituted a Public Access Policy: The NIH Public Access Policy ensures that the public has access to the published results of NIH funded research. It requires scientists to […]

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Does the UC patent amendment provide an opportunity for mischief?

By Michael Eisen | Published: December 20, 2011

About a month ago, I received an email with the subject “PLEASE SIGN NOW: UC Patent Amendment”. Being quite interested in issues of intellectual property in academia (as I will explain below, I think all IP arising from publicly funded work should be in the public domain) the combination of such insistent language along with […]

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Peer review is f***ed up – let’s fix it

By Michael Eisen | Published: October 28, 2011

Peer review is ostensibly one of the central pillars of modern science. A paper is not taken seriously by other scientists unless it is published in a “peer reviewed” journal. Jobs, grants and tenure are parceled out, in no small part, on the basis of lists of “peer reviewed” papers. The public has been trained […]

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PLoS Won

By Michael Eisen | Published: October 25, 2011

When Pat Brown, Harold Varmus and I started the Public Library of Science (PLoS) 10 years ago with the goal of making the scientific and medical literature a universally freely available resource, most people in the science publishing industry dismissed us as naive idealists who didn’t understand that publishing is a business that has to […]

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The HHMI/Wellcome/MPI super journal and the triumph of open access

By Michael Eisen | Published: July 2, 2011

On Monday the world’s three most prominent private funders of scientific research – the US’s Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the UK’s Wellcome Trust and Germany’s Max Planck Society – announced plans for a new “top-tier, open access journal for biomedical and life sciences research”. Basic features of the as of yet unnamed journal (I suggest […]

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Announcing The Batavia Open Genomic Data Licence

By Michael Eisen | Published: June 7, 2011

Prepublication release of genomic and other large-scale biological datasets is incredibly value to the research community. For the last decade big genome sequencing centers – backed by the NIH and other funders – have followed a set of principles outlined at a January 2003 meeting in Ft. Lauderdale sponsored by The Wellcome Trust. This so called […]

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Press release? We don’t need no stinking press release?

By Michael Eisen | Published: March 24, 2011

I hate press releases – especially around scientific papers. They rarely explain the work clearly, almost always overstate its significance, and are often grossly dishonest. But scientists and their press offices, working in close collaboration with journals, continue churning them, hoping to earn popular press coverage of their latest findings. They go through this unseemly process […]

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