Salon

The free research movement


The Public Library of Science aims to break the stranglehold that expensive academic journals have over federally funded research -- and start a scientific revolution. Michael Eisen, a biologist at UC-Berkeley, once spent a summer working as a play-by-play announcer for the minor league Columbia Mules, and when he talks about the sorry state of scientific publishing, he has a tendency to slip into an announcer's voice -- quick, high-pitched, loud, intense.