Author Archives: Michael Eisen

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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Berkeley’s Handling of Sexual Harassment is a Disgrace

By Michael Eisen | Published: March 10, 2016

What more is there to say? Another case where a senior member of the Berkeley faculty, this time Berkeley Law Dean Sujit Choudhry, was found to have violated the campus’s sexual harassment policy, and was given a slap on the wrists by the administration. Astronomer Geoff Marcy’s punishment for years of harassment of students was a […]

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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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The Villain of CRISPR

By Michael Eisen | Published: January 25, 2016
Eric Lander

There is something mesmerizing about an evil genius at the height of their craft, and Eric Lander is an evil genius at the height of his craft. Lander’s recent essay in Cell entitled “The Heroes of CRISPR” is his masterwork, at once so evil and yet so brilliant that I find it hard not to […]

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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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Vegan Thanksgiving Picnic Pie Recipe

By Michael Eisen | Published: November 27, 2015

I posted some pictures of this Thanksgiving themes picnic pie (completely vegan) on Twitter and Facebook. A bunch of people asked me for my recipe. Unfortunately, it was almost completely improvised, so I don’t have a recipe. But here is roughly what I did. First of all, a few weeks ago I had no idea what a […]

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You Have Died Of Peer Review

By Michael Eisen | Published: October 17, 2015

      I’ve been feeling the need for some new publishing related t-shirts, and somehow this idea popped into my head.   For those of you who don’t know, it’s based on the popular 80’s computer game Oregon Trail, where games would often end with the alert that “You Have Died Of Dysentery” I made […]

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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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What Geoffrey Marcy did was abominable; What Berkeley didn’t do was worse

By Michael Eisen | Published: October 11, 2015

I am so disappointed and revolted with my university. On Friday, Azeen Ghorayshi posted a story about Geoffrey Marcy, a high-profile professor in UC Berkeley’s astronomy department. It reported on a a complaint filed by four women to Berkeley’s Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination (OPHD) that alleged that Marcy “repeatedly engaged in inappropriate physical behavior with students, including […]

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