Michael B. Eisen, Ph.D; Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Associate Professor, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley; Co-founder, Public Library of Science

The scientific literature is one of humanity’s greatest creations – a complete record of the ideas, experiments and discoveries of generations of researchers across the globe. While most of this corpus is now online, it remains as inaccessible to the public as it was centuries ago – with the physical limitations of print journals replaced by expensive publisher pay walls. Eisen, a leader in the movement to reinvent scientific communication, will discuss the origins of this absurd system, why it still exists, how the “open access” movement he helped to launch is finally bringing it to an end.

MLF: Health & Medicine/Science & Technology
Program Organizer: Chisako Ress and Kishore Hari