The shockwaves of the Israel-Hamas war continue to spread. Scientific journals, which might have thought themselves immune from the tremors, are now being hit. The editor-in-chief of the scientific journal eLife, Michael Eisen, was dismissed on October 24 following a controversial tweet on X (formerly Twitter). This decision on the part of the board of directors has provoked a heated debate within the publication but also more widely in the research community, where many voices were upset by this challenge to freedom of expression.
It all began on October 13. Eisen, who is a professor of biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and has run the journal since 2019, retweeted an article, on his personal account, from the satirical newspaper The Onion about the bombings in Gaza. Its headline sets the tone: "Dying Gazans Criticized For Not Using Last Words To Condemn Hamas." "Bingo," Eisen commented. He then posted a second tweet: "The Onion speaks with more courage, insight and moral clarity than the leaders of every academic institution put together. I wish there were a @TheOnion university."
The controversy quickly spread on the social media platform, an amplifier of all negative feelings. A number of Israeli scientists announced that they would no longer submit articles to the magazine as long as Eisen was editor-in-chief. This first led the board to distance itself from the offending tweet. Then, on October 24, it announced Eisen's "replacement." The stated reason: "[H]is approach to leadership, communication and social media has at key times been detrimental to the cohesion of the community we are trying to build and hence to eLife's mission." According to this statement, his tweet was just "a further incidence of this behavior."
It's true that Eisen is not exactly a champion of consensus. A renowned molecular biologist, he has gained much of his celebrity for the fight he has waged over the past 25 years against the dominant model of scientific publishing, which elevates journals as the sole judges of the quality of scientific work and imposes exorbitant access fees on readers. With two other researchers, he first created the PLOS group, which offers readers free access to published content. This alternative model, which charges publication fees to the authors of the articles, has been a great success – but has also earned Eisen some strong enemies in the process.
Things got even worse in 2019, when he transformed eLife. The journal now only publishes articles that have already been submitted to preprint servers. What's more, it makes all peer reviews public, unlike most journals. And, since January this year, all peer-reviewed articles are published, even if the reviews are negative. No more monopoly on publication, no more secret judgments, no more rejection by reviewers...
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