a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things

In an article in The New Republic about how Republicans are being disingenous by opposing the health care bill on account of its length, Harold Pollack writes:

Most of the junk DNA of the Senate bill is the usual block-and-tackle of complicated legislation, and is of no particular ideological or partisan concern. Many of the Senate bill’s 2,000 pages concern proposed delivery reforms and other measures that are widely supported by policy wonks across the political spectrum, including those in the recently-departed Bush administration. There’s a lot of complex detail to get right.

I’ve made no secret of my opposition to this week’s protests at Berkeley and other UC campuses. The tactics were stale, the targets were wrong, and the rhetoric was ineffective. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t think what’s going on at UC doesn’t completely suck.

The immediate cause of the protests was the 32% tuition increase instituted last week by the regents. While a UC education remains a bargain – the ~$2,500 increase in annual tuition brings the total to around $10,000 – the extra cost will be a crushing burden for many students.

But it doesn’t really matter whether you view $10,000 as unreasonably high or a great deal. The real problem with the tuition increase is what is says about the UC’s – and Berkeley in particular – status as a public institution.

Berkeley became what it is today – the best public university in the world – because the state lavished money on it – not only to subsidize student tuition (which, until Reagan was governor, was effectively free) but also to build the research facilities, museums, libraries and other trappings of an elite university and to recruit the best faculty to fill them.

And, as students are being asked to pick up a larger share of the budget, the university’s financial crisis is driving researchers, curators, etc… who have long relied on state support to adopt more of a private fundraising model. And in doing so, Berkeley is becoming more and more like every other place. And while that doesn’t necessarily mean it will stop being an elite university, it does mean it will stop being the special place it currently is.

I also want to say something about the Berkeley protesters fingering of UC president Yudof and Berkeley  chancellor Birgeneau as the culprits. I think this is absurd. Given the state of the university’s budget, they’ve really had no choice but the slash salaries, lay off workers and raise tuition. And the idea that the administration is somehow sitting on huge pots of money that they’re not spending because they want to hasten the transition to a private institution model (something a lot of protesters were arguing) is absurd.

Everything I’ve read and heard suggests that Yudof has done his best to argue our case in Sacramento. And it’s not clear that anything would have changed enough minds to make a difference. But, as we constantly tell our students, it doesn’t matter how hard you try on the test – you have to succeed. And there’s no doubt that UCs administration has failed to defend the university against the brutal cuts it has, of late, absorbed. Someone has to be held accountable for this failure.

I sent this letter to some colleagues who are supporting the proposed UC faculty walkout on September 24th.

I want to thank you and the others who are spending their time and energy trying to figure out how to deal with challenges of the UC budget. I understand the appeal and value of a collective expression of disgust from the UC faculty, staff and students. But as loathsome as I find the budget cuts and as concerned as I am about the future of the UC system, the framing of this issue as being a battle between UC faculty and Yudof/UCOP is so misplaced and wildly counterproductive that there is no way I can support it.

While I am far from agreeing with everything Yudof has done, or the way he has done it, the clear culprit here is declining public financial support for the UC system. One of the main reasons we keep on absorbing these cuts – and why many have become permanent – is the sense amongst many that the University is rich, and doesn’t need this money. So the implication from SAVE and others that somehow the furloughs and other cuts were discretionary actions taken by UCOP is not only absurd, but plays right into the hands of people who want to cut the budgets even more.

I agree that a major part of the problem is that people on the outside of UC don’t realize how devastating these cuts are to the system, and how they threaten our role as the premier public institution in the nation. We should be doing everything in our powers to educate the public, and our students, about these issues.

Unfortunately, whether intentional or not, the walkout and assocaited actions have become a platform for firing invectives at Yudof or rallying for faculty self-governance – which, while important, is not the most important thing right now. It makes us seem shrill and self-serving, and does not advance what should be our main objective – directing a positive appeal to the taxpayers of California to renew their support for UC.

Science 17 July 2009:
Vol. 325. no. 5938, p. 266
DOI: 10.1126/science.325_266c

Letters
Open Access: The Sooner the Better
In the Brevia “Open access and global participation in science” (20 February, p. 1025), J. A. Evans and J. Reimer argue that a research article published online is only modestly (8%) more likely to be cited if it is freely available. This result would seem to cast doubt on one important argument in favor of free access—that it will increase the visibility of a paper to colleagues.

However, the 8% statistic that Evans and Reimer highlight is misleading. The authors’ supporting online material (figure S1C) clearly shows that the impact of free access on citations is heavily dependent on the age of the article at the time free access was provided. In particular, when articles were made freely available within 2 years of publication, their citations increased by almost 20%.

This far more dramatic effect is the one scientists and journals should consider when deciding when to provide free access. If this decision is to be made purely on the basis of citation impact, the upward trend of the curve in figure S1C argues strongly in favor of minimal delays.

Unfortunately, it is hard to tell exactly how short a delay the data support, because the underlying citation information is not provided. That the raw data for such a provocative paper is unavailable is an astonishing violation of the norms of science, and the explicitly stated publication policies of Science.

Michael Eisen1,* and Steven Salzberg2

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: mbeisen@berkeley.edu

1 Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
2 Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, MD 20742, USA.

Nature ran a weird Correspondence from Swiss organic chemist François Diederich.