The House Judiciary Committee held hearings today on the newly introduced “Fair Copyright and Research Works Act (H.R. 6845),” which is a publisher-promoted effort to repeal the NIH Public Access Policy. Peter Suber’s Open Access News discusses the hearings here and here. Karen Rustad at Little Green River has a great post about the hearing. […]
Two Democratic congressmen (Howard Berman or CA-28 and John Conyers, Jr. of MI-14) are planning to introduce a bill into the US House of Representatives that would effectively kill the NIH Public Access Policy. They are responding to complaints (and donations) from the American Association of Publishers (the lobbying wing of the journal publishers). The […]
President Obama published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association today discussing the current state of his health care reform initiatives. Fortunately, the article is not behind a paywall. But JAMA nonetheless asserts their ownership and right to control the article’s use, as they do on all articles they publish, by attaching […]
Several people have noted that, in my previous post dealing with PLOS’s business, I didn’t address a point that came up in a number of threads regarding the relative virtues of PLOS and scientific societies – the basic point being that people should publish in society journals because they do good things with the money (run meetings, […]
Like everybody, I have a series of interests, financial and otherwise, that could be affected by things I do and opine on. I endeavor not to let these influence my actions as a scientist or commentator. But I am not naive enough to think that I can always do this, and feel it is important […]
In 2005 I submitted an essay about science publishing to a political magazine. I got a polite reply back saying that the article was interesting and the issue important but that my approach wasn’t right for them. My piece was too straightforward. Too persuasive. They preferred articles that had a simple “hook” and, most importantly, were “counterintuitive”. Zoom […]
People who know me or read my blog will know that, in 1987, my father, a scientist at the NIH, killed himself after a member of his lab committed scientific fraud and he got caught up in the investigation. So I found the news this morning that Yoshiki Sasai, a Japanese stem cell scientist, committed suicide […]
Yesterday the Department of Energy became one of the first federal agencies to announce its plan to comply with a 2013 White Houses directive ordering federal agencies to provide the public with access to the results of research that they fund. Here are the main features: DOE will host a centralized database of metadata (title, authors) The full-text of […]
Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado Denver, has come to some fame in science publication circles for highlighting the growing number of “predatory” open access publishers and curating a list of them. His work has provided a useful service to people seeking to navigate the sometimes confusing array of new journals – […]
I have written a lot about how I think the biggest problem in science communication today is the disproportionate value we place on where papers are published when assessing the validity and import of a work of science, and the contribution of its authors. And I have argued that the best way to change this […]
I'm a biologist at UC Berkeley and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. I work primarily on flies, and my research encompases evolution, development, genetics, genomics, chemical ecology and behavior. I am a strong proponent of open science, and a co-founder of the Public Library of Science. And most importantly, I am a Red Sox fan. (More about me here).