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The editor-in-chief of a prominent open-access science journal was fired from his position this week after tweeting about the war in Gaza. On October 13, Michael Eisen, a UC Berkeley geneticist who until this week edited eLife—a publication founded on tenets of working to be inclusive, espouse freedom of expression, and make science more accessible—shared an article published by the Onion earlier in the day that was headlined “Dying Gazans criticized for not using last words to condemn Hamas.”
It kicked off a two-week dust-up that finally ended on Monday, when Eisen posted an update on X (formerly Twitter) explaining that the board had spoken and eLife was now editor-less: “I have been informed that I am being replaced as the Editor in Chief of @eLife for retweeting a @TheOnion piece that calls out indifference to the lives of Palestinian civilians.”
Eisen’s firing ranks him among the highest-profile individuals canceled so far for speaking in public about the war. Others include a Florida dentist who was let go after being caught on video ripping down posters of murdered Israelis, and Columbia and Harvard law students whose job offers at major firms were rescinded after they blamed Israel for Hamas’s October 7 attacks that killed 1,400 Israelis. Eisen, meanwhile, wrote a tweet that linked to the above article, and editorialized that The Onion “speaks with more courage, insight, and moral clarity than the leaders of every academic institution put together.”
Pushback began right away, and Eisen attempted to contextualize the comment by noting that he’s Jewish, has family in Israel, and “is horrified and traumatized by what Hamas did and wants it to never happen again,” but that The Onion was “using satire to make a deadly serious point about this horrific tragedy.”
The next day, eLife got busy denouncing Hamas in a tweet of its own, noting all editorial board members must follow a code of conduct, and that it will “take breaches of this seriously and investigate accordingly.” It never explained which part of the code of conduct Eisen had violated. But on Tuesday, eLife’s board published a letter that began with “We thank Mike Eisen for his creativity and vision in building eLife’s transformative new publishing model,” but went on to call the editor’s approach to leadership and social media at times “detrimental to the cohesion of the community we are trying to build and hence to eLife’s mission.” It concluded by saying two deputy editors—Oxford neuroscientist Tim Behrens and Detlef Weigel, a biologist at Munich’s Max Planck Society whose tweets are protected—would serve as co-editors-in-chief until the end of 2024.
A history of promoting freedom of information
In 2000, alongside Nobel Prize-winning Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center director Harold Varmus and Impossible Foods founder Pat Brown (then at Stanford), Eisen started the Public Library of Science, which has grown into a pioneering publisher of 12 different free journals. eLife was created later, in 2012, with backing from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Max Planck Society, and England’s Wellcome Trust as a similar alternative to “luxury journals,” such as Cell, Nature, and Science, publications that eLife founding editor Randy Schekman, a Nobel-winning cell biologist, once denounced as “high-end ‘fashion designers’ that artificially stoke demand for their brand through scarcity.”
To make their papers open-access, academics writing in journals are often asked to pay hefty sums—more than $10,000, in Nature’s case. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences charges as much as $4,200 to publish the article, then an additional $1,700 to $2,200 for open access. Researchers who don’t, or cannot, pony up the difference see their papers locked behind a paywall. That affects authors without means to pay the open-access surcharge, as well as readers at the other end without means to purchase the articles.
Under Eisen, who became editor in 2019, a year after he unsuccessfully challenged Senator Diane Feinstein as an independent candidate, eLife tried to tackle this prestige publishing problem by reducing the article processing charges—from an already low $3,000 to $2,000, with waivers available to authors in need. It also pioneered a publishing model it dubbed “publish, then review,” in which articles accepted for publication are made immediately and freely available to everyone with internet access, a departure from the usual process where reviewers, especially if they have clout, can delay publication of an article for years if they want. eLife’s policy is that if it decides an article will be peer-reviewed, then that article will run, end of story. In full transparency, the reviewers’ comments—which rarely get made public—also appear alongside the paper.
In the wake of Eisen’s tweet, infighting at eLife has cleared out a number of prominent pro-Israel academics. Karina Yaniv, an Israeli professor of vascular disease at the Weizmann Institute, tweeted that she was resigning as an editor so she could “dedicate my volunteering time to groups whose ‘courage, insight, and moral clarity’ are now speaking up for babies, kids, and women kidnapped by Hamas.” University of Southern California neuroscientist Dion Dickman wrote he was also leaving eLife’s editorial board, calling it “a time for moral clarity and leadership amidst all the pain.” Oded Rechavi, a professor at Tel Aviv University, asked those quitting to hashtag social-media posts with “#resignfromelife.”
Protections that Eisen enjoys as a tenured faculty member at Berkeley didn’t apply at eLife, and his predecessor as editor, Randy Schekman, told Nature on Wednesday that Eisen “has a history of inflammatory and often profane statements on his Twitter account,” and the Onion tweet was likely just the last straw in the board’s eyes. (Fast Company has reached out to eLife, but did not hear back by time of publication.)
A controversial decision
Yet the outcry about a chilling effect on freedom of speech still stands, critics say, particularly when the offender is an institution founded on a commitment to, in eLife’s words, “create a future where a diverse, global community of scientists and researchers shares open and trusted results for the benefit of the greater good.”
Meanwhile, Eisen has seen a wave of support, including a tweet from his brother, Jonathan Eisen, a UC Davis biology professor and editor-in-chief of PLOS Biology, calling the firing “an extremely idiotic move.” Departures from eLife have followed from his supporters, too.
On Wednesday, University of Dundee researcher Fede Pelisch stepped down after serving just 10 months as a director on eLife’s board. “I joined eLife a few years ago because I considered it an innovative venue for publishing open access, high quality research papers” that also promoted a “culture of inclusion and diversity,” he wrote in his resignation letter. “Unlike Eisen’s tweet,” he added, eLife’s response “was not only an irrational, emotional response, but also carried the weight of the organization and not only of an individual.” According to Pelisch, the statement was not unanimous and did not reflect the views of all board members, a result of which is that now “some people feel understandably silenced, a very harmful consequence for a journal that is meant to ‘promote a research culture that values openness, integrity and equity, diversity, and inclusion.’”
Separately, a petition urging eLife and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute not to “censure” Eisen gathered signatures from almost 2,000 life scientists in two days before the organizers—MIT neurologist Nancy Kanwisher and Stony Brook geneticist Joshua Dubnau—said the outpouring of support was overwhelming them.
Punishing Eisen would “create a chilling effect on freedom of expression in academia,” their petition argued. Signers said they saw three contexts in which leaders may need to be fired for their views: One is if their views contradict the organization’s (say, an NRA spokesperson who suddenly started advocating for gun control). Another is if they exercise poor judgment by disrespecting others or being ignorant about their profession. The third is if their views are hate speech. Eisen’s conduct didn’t flout any of these, the signers warned, arguing that firing him would suggest that eLife is “aligned with a culture of fear, intolerance, and political repression,” a policy that “has no place in a democracy, let alone within academia.”
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