Category Archives: PLoS

Because the “Boycott Elsevier” movement needed a t-shirt

By Michael Eisen | Published: February 12, 2012

I decided to design an image: For those of you who don’t recognize it, it’s inspired by Elsevier’s old printers mark, emblazoned in all of their texts since the 17th century: I hope the iconography of my image is self-explanatory.

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New bill in Congress would EXPAND federal public access policies!

By Michael Eisen | Published: February 9, 2012

A showdown is looming in Congress as defenders of the public interest have moved to counter the special interest sellout of the pending Research Works Act (RWA), which would end public access to the results of Federally funded research. A bipartisan group of legislators in both houses of  Congress just introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act […]

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The widely held notion that high-impact publications determine who gets academic jobs, grants and tenure is wrong. Stop using it as an excuse.

By Michael Eisen | Published: February 4, 2012

In response to my previous post on boycotting non-OA journals, my friend Gavin Sherlock made the following comment: I laud what you are doing, and you have changed the world of publishing forever for the better. However, I was specifically told by my chair that I need a Nature or Science paper to make my […]

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You are Elsevier: time to overcome our fears and kill subscription journals

By Michael Eisen | Published: February 3, 2012

Having spent a decade fighting the scientific publishing establishment, the last few weeks have been kind of fun. Elsevier, the Dutch publishing conglomerate that has long served as the poster child for all that is wrong with the industry, has come under withering criticism for pushing legislation that would prevent the US government from making the […]

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Nature’s shiny sounding copout on open access

By Michael Eisen | Published: January 26, 2012

Nature has an editorial in this week’s issue on broader issues surround access to the scientific literature. Several people have sent it to me with some variation on “Wow, Nature is saying good things about open access”. I was skeptical, given that Nature has a long history of occasionally saying the right things about open access one […]

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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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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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