Search Results for: nih

A CHORUS of boos: publishers offer their “solution” to public access

By Michael Eisen | Published: June 4, 2013

As expected, a coalition of subscription based journal publishers has responded to the White House’s mandate that federal agencies develop systems to make the research they fund available to public by offering to implement the system themselves. This system, which they call CHORUS (for ClearingHouse for the Open Research of the United Status) would set up […]

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Apotheosis of cynicism and deceit from scholarly publishers

By Michael Eisen | Published: May 21, 2013

The Association of American Publishers, who lobby on behalf of most for-profit and society scholarly publishers, have long opposed moves to make the scientific literature more readily available to the public. But, as open access publishing has gained traction and funders increasingly demand free access to the work they fund, the AAP’s defense of the […]

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WTF? The University of California sides with publishers against the public

By Michael Eisen | Published: April 21, 2013

The University of California system spends nearly $40 million every year to buy access to academic journals, even though many of the articles are written, reviewed, and edited by UC professors. So you’d think the cash-strapped UC system would leap to back any effort to undermine the absurd science publishing system. You’d think. But you’d […]

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Door-to-door subscription scams: the dark side of The New York Times

By Michael Eisen | Published: April 9, 2013

An article appeared on the front page of the Sunday New York Times purporting to expose a “parallel world of pseudo-academia, complete with prestigiously titled conferences and journals that sponsor them”. The story describes the experience of some unnamed scientists who accepted an email invitation to a conference, which then charged them for participating, and […]

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Toxoplasma, Cat Piss and Mouse Brains: my lab’s first paper on microbial manipulation of animal behavior

By Michael Eisen | Published: April 2, 2013

All animals live in a microbe rich environment, with immense numbers of bacteria, archaea, fungi and other eukaryotic microbes living in, on and around them. For some of these microbes, the association is transitory and unimportant, but many make animals their permanent home, or interact with them in ways that are vital for their survival. Many […]

Posted in EisenLab preprints, microbial manipulation of animal behavior, My lab | Comments closed

The Past, Present and Future of Scholarly Publishing

By Michael Eisen | Published: March 28, 2013

I gave a talk last night at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco about science publishing and PLoS. There will be an audio link soon, but, for the first time in my life, I actually gave the talk (largely) from prepared remarks, so I thought I’d post it here. An audio recording of the talk […]

Posted in open access, PLoS, science | Comments closed

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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My father, Aaron Swartz, and assigning blame for suicide

By Michael Eisen | Published: February 8, 2013

Twenty-six years ago, on February 7th, 1987, my father killed himself, and this day is always a complicated one for me. It is something I have never talked or written about in public. But I am moved to say something this year because of the suicide of Aaron Swartz. My brother had the same reaction, and wrote […]

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Blinded by Big Science: The lesson I learned from ENCODE is that projects like ENCODE are not a good idea

By Michael Eisen | Published: September 10, 2012

When the draft sequence of the human genome was finished in 2001, the accomplishment was heralded as marking the dawn of the age of “big biology”. The high-throughput techniques and automation developed to sequence DNA on a massive scale would be wielded to generate not just genomes, but reference data sets in all areas of […]

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This 100,000 word post on the ENCODE media bonanza will cure cancer

By Michael Eisen | Published: September 6, 2012

It is oddly fitting that the papers describing the results of the NIH’s massive $200m ENCODE project were published in the midst of political convention season. For this was no typical scientific publication, but a carefully orchestrated spectacle, meant to justify a massive, expensive undertaking, and to convince us that we are better off now […]

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