Michael Eisen: the Mission Bay Manifesto on Science Publishing

Michael Eisen, HHMI investigator at UC Berkeley, has come up with the following manifesto:

The Mission Bay Manifesto

As a scientists privileged to work at UCSF we solemnly pledge to fix for future generations the current system of science communication and assessment which does not serve the interests of science or the public by committing to the following actions:

(1) We will make everything we write immediate freely available as soon as it is finished using “preprint” servers like arxiv.org, bioRxiv.org, or the equivalent.

(2) No paper we write, or data or tools we produce, will ever, for even one second, be placed behind a paywall where they are inaccessible to even one scientists, teacher, student, health care provider, patient or interested member of the public.

(3) We will never refer to journal titles when discussing my work in talks, on my CV, in job or grant application, or any other context. We will provide only a title, a list of authors and publicly available link for all of my papers on CVs, job and grant applications.

(4) We will evaluate the work of other scientists based exclusively on the quality of their work, not on where they have published it. We will never refer to journal titles or use journal titles as a proxy for quality when evaluating the work of other scientists in any context.

(5) We will abandon the slow, cumbersome and distorting practice of pre-publication peer review and exclusively engage in open post-publication peer review as an author and reviewer (e.g. as practiced by journals like F1000 Research, The Winnower and others, or review sites like PubPeer).

(6) We will join with my colleagues and collectively make our stance on these issues public, and will follow this pledge without fail so that our students, postdocs and other trainees who are still building their careers do not suffer while we work to fix a broken system we have created and allowed to fester.

At his blog, you can read about some of the reaction he has encountered so far -it's been lukewarm:
http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1760