Author Archives: Michael Eisen

With its HeLa genome agreement, the NIH embraces a expansive definition of familial consent in genetics

By Michael Eisen | Published: August 7, 2013

I wrote before about the controversy involving the release earlier this year of a genome sequence of the HeLa cell line, which was taken without consent from Henrietta Lacks as she lay dying of ovarian cancer in 1950s Baltimore. Now, the NIH has announced an agreement with Lacks’ descendants to obtain their consent for access […]

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Let’s not get too excited about the new UC open access policy

By Michael Eisen | Published: August 2, 2013

It was announced today that systemwide Academic Senate representing the 10 campuses of the University of California system had passed an “open access” policy. The policy will work like this. Before assigning copyright to publishers, all UC faculty will grant the university a non-exclusive license to make the works freely available, provide the university with […]

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Those who deny access to history are condemned repeatedly

By Michael Eisen | Published: July 26, 2013

One of the most disappointing aspects of the push for open access to scholarly works has been the role of scholarly societies – who have, with precious few exceptions, emerged as staunch defenders of the status quo. In the sciences – where most of the open access battles have been fought – anti-OA stances from […]

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New Preprint: Uniform scaling of temperature dependent and species specific changes in timing of Drosophila development

By Michael Eisen | Published: June 24, 2013

We posted a new preprint from the lab on arXiv and would love your comments. This work was born of our efforts to look at evolution of transcription factor binding in early embryos across Drosophila. When we started doing experiments comparing the three most commonly studied species, the model D. melanogaster, D.pseudoobscura and D. virilis, we quickly ran […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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