Category Archives: open access

Obama and Copyright

By Michael Eisen | Published: February 8, 2009

I haven’t been so worried about the Conyers bill to end the NIH Public Access policy because I figured even in the unlikely event it got through Congress, Obama wouldn’t sign it. But then I read this post by Seth Johnson about “stacking” of the Justice Department with veteran copyright defenders. I’m still not all […]

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Conyers reintroduces bill to kill NIH Public Access Policy

By Michael Eisen | Published: February 6, 2009

John Conyers (D-MI) has reintroduced his publisher-backed “Fair Copyright Act”  which would effectively end the NIH Public Access Policy by eliminating the government’s right to impose conditions on grants that would give the government the right to distribute works arising from federally funded research. As many have pointed out, the whole premise of the bill […]

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PLoS NTD features in Nicholas Kristof’s Op-Ed about Guantanamo

By Michael Eisen | Published: January 29, 2009

Last year, Peter Hotez published an editorial in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases in which he proposed that rather than just close the prison at Guantonamo Bay, we instead establish a “center of excellence on the diseases of poor that … would directly address poverty and health disparities in the worst-off nations in Central and South […]

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Genome Technology: Open access on the rise

By Michael Eisen | Published: October 31, 2008

The November issue of Genome Technology has an article “Ready or Not, Here Comes Open Access” by Meredith Salisbury on the ascendancy of open access. I haven’t read it yet (grant due next week) but the cover has what I think is the first picture of the three PLoS founders together: It’s a nice picure […]

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Happy Birthday PLoS Biology

By Michael Eisen | Published: October 13, 2008

Five years ago today Public Library of Science (PLoS) published the first issue of our first journal – PLoS Biology. It was the first step in our plan to liberate the scientific and medical literature from the needless restrictions on access and use imposed by the subscription based journals. Our goal, as expressed in the […]

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Where Would Jesus Publish?

By Michael Eisen | Published: October 9, 2008

What I do with my spare time. (T-shirts available soon).

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Commercial Ascendance of Open Access – Springer buys BioMed Central

By Michael Eisen | Published: October 7, 2008

The long-rumored sale of BioMed Central – the first true open access publisher – has finally been consumated. I am sure some will lament the sale of the innovative BMC to a publishing behemoth, but this is an unambiguously good thing for open access. This proves what we at PLoS have been saying since we […]

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Tij to head HHMI

By Michael Eisen | Published: September 30, 2008

HHMI just announced that my Berkeley colleague Robert Tjian (Tij to everyone) is going to be the new president of HHMI. As I am now an employee of HHMI, I was quite interested in the search to replace Tom Cech – and I couldn’t be more thrilled with the result. Tij is a fantastic scientist […]

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Congressional testimony on NIH Public Access repeal effort

By Michael Eisen | Published: September 12, 2008

The House Judiciary Committee held hearings today on the newly introduced “Fair Copyright and Research Works Act (H.R. 6845),” which is a publisher-promoted effort to repeal the NIH Public Access Policy. Peter Suber’s Open Access News discusses the hearings here and here. Karen Rustad at Little Green River has a great post about the hearing. […]

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Legislative threat to NIH public access policy

By Michael Eisen | Published: September 9, 2008

Two Democratic congressmen (Howard Berman or CA-28 and John Conyers, Jr. of MI-14) are planning to introduce a bill into the US House of Representatives that would effectively kill the NIH Public Access Policy. They are responding to complaints (and donations) from the American Association of Publishers (the lobbying wing of the journal publishers). The […]

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