Category Archives: science

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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Elsevier-funded NY Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney Wants to Deny Americans Access to Taxpayer Funded Research

By Michael Eisen | Published: January 5, 2012

In 2008, under bipartisan pressure from Congress to ensure that all Americans would be able to access the results of taxpayer-funded biomedical research, the US National Institutes of Health instituted a Public Access Policy: The NIH Public Access Policy ensures that the public has access to the published results of NIH funded research. It requires scientists to […]

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Stop the presses! H5N1 Frankenflu is going to kill us all!

By Michael Eisen | Published: December 23, 2011

I have watched the escalating hysteria about recent NIH-funded experiments to humanize H5N1 influenze (aka bird flu) with a mixture of amusement, horror and confusion. The amusement is born of the predictable hysteria that always infuses media coverage of research on lethal virus. The horror comes from the largely unchallenged move to censor publication of the […]

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Does the UC patent amendment provide an opportunity for mischief?

By Michael Eisen | Published: December 20, 2011

About a month ago, I received an email with the subject “PLEASE SIGN NOW: UC Patent Amendment”. Being quite interested in issues of intellectual property in academia (as I will explain below, I think all IP arising from publicly funded work should be in the public domain) the combination of such insistent language along with […]

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When a photo caption says it all

By Michael Eisen | Published: November 30, 2011

This is from a kind of silly article in the NYT about how people are generating too much DNA sequence data and we can’t really deal with the deluge. They get lots of smart people (many of whom are my friends) to talk about this problem – but I think they’re making a mountain out […]

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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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