Prominent journal editor fired for endorsing satirical article about Israel-Hamas conflict
eLife’s Michael Eisen ousted for social media posts perceived as siding with Palestinians over Israel
eLife has reportedly fired its editor-in-chief, Michael Eisen, pictured here in 2017, over some of his social media posts.JASON HENRY/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX
Michael Eisen, editor-in-chief of the prominent open-access journal eLife and longtime critic of traditional journals, says he is losing that job for publicly endorsing a satirical article that criticized people dying in Gaza for not condemning the recent attacks on Israel by the Palestinian group Hamas.
“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 posted on the social media platform X today. Multiple editors at eLife or advisers to the journal have already resigned to protest his dismissal.
eLife subsequently
confirmed the firing in a statement, saying: “Mike has been given clear feedback from the board that his 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. It is against this background that a further incidence of this behaviour has contributed to the board’s decision.” It added that the journal was committed to its new “publish–review–curate”
publishing model that Eisen had championed. eLife’s publisher, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), referred Science to the journal’s statement.
The furor began on 13 October when Eisen, an HHMI-funded geneticist at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, praised one of
The Onion’s fake news stories on X, formerly Twitter. The story bore the headline: “Dying Gazans Criticized For Not Using Last Words To Condemn Hamas.” Eisen said, “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.”
Criticism of Eisen, who is Jewish, for a perceived lack of sympathy for the Israelis killed by Hamas immediately erupted. But the scientist, who is known for being provocative, did not retreat. A day later,
he posted, “Every sane person on Earth is horrified and traumatized by what Hamas did and wants it to never happen again. All the more so as a Jew with Israeli family. But I am also horrified by the collective punishment already being meted out on Gazans, and the worse that is about to come. … The Onion is not making light of the situation. And nor am I. These articles are using satire to make a deadly serious point about this horrific tragedy.”
That explanation did not mollify some scientists. “Empty words. For 7 days you haven’t tweeted a single time words of supports [sic] for Israeli researchers, some of which lost kids and friends. And now you dare to give us military advice from your privileged position of safety. What a moral bankruptcy,”
responded Yaniv Erlich, a prominent Israeli American scientist who is now CEO of a company called Eleven Therapeutics.
Some Israeli researchers demanded that Eisen
resign and that colleagues stop submitting papers to eLife as long as he remained in charge. Such calls quickly provoked social media debates about freedom of speech. A
petition was launched urging HHMI not to remove or censure Eisen over his posts. “Our opinion is not based on the merits (or lack thereof) of Eisen’s views. Rather, we believe that censuring Eisen would create a chilling effect on freedom of expression in academia,” the petitioners wrote. The petition now has more than 1000 signatures, organizers say.
“The whole [academic] enterprise we’re engaged in rests on the ability to have open intellectual exchange about any topic and express our views honestly,” says Josh Dubnau, a neurobiologist at Stony Brook University and one of the letter’s authors. “Nothing he said was repugnant or hateful. There shouldn’t be consequences for minority views in academia.” Dubnau went on to ask whether eLife would define acceptable positions on other controversial issues, such as abortion or the war in Ukraine.Dubnau, who is Jewish, says many junior scientists have privately contacted him to thank him for speaking out, but are afraid their own careers would be harmed if they said anything publicly about the conflict in Gaza.
Eisen told Science that he met with eLife’s board on 19 October to discuss his tweets and a few hours later was asked to resign “without much explanation other than that the tweet had caused problems for eLife. … The board doesn’t want eLife to be embroiled in controversies and they look at me, I guess, as someone who makes things controversial.”
Eisen says the board told him he would be fired if he did not resign, but he refused. “I think this was a terrible decision by eLife leadership,” Eisen says. “They’re going to alienate and have alienated a huge part of the community: people who don’t think it’s bad to express political opinions that not everybody agrees with.”
He acknowledges past tensions over his decisions to change the journal’s publishing model, and that a number of scientists previously called for him to be fired. Eisen says he is not concerned about his future with HHMI or UC Berkeley. (He has been an HHMI-backed investigator since 2008.) “I’m fine, I will keep fighting for [open-access publishing] and find another way to do it,” he says. “I will now be a pain in the ass from the outside because now I can tell them how I think things should be done.” But Eisen expressed concern for people who are less privileged and may be afraid to speak up about their political views for fear of unemployment.
Shortly after Eisen’s announcement of his firing, Lara Urban, a reviewing editor and early-career adviser for eLife,
posted on X that she was resigning from her position at the journal. “Mike’s dismissal for expressing his personal views sets a dangerous precedent for freedom of speech in our academic community,” wrote Urban, a genomics researcher at Helmholtz Munich. “
t validates cyber-bullying as a successful and legitimate tool to get scientists with controversial opinions fired.”
Molly Przeworski, an evolutionary geneticist at Columbia University and senior editor at eLife for more than 10 years, also said she would resign from the journal. “This decision is both discriminatory and a dangerous precedent; it is also a violation of @eLife ’s own code of conduct, to be ‘respectful of differing opinions, viewpoints, and experiences,’” she posted. Przeworski told Science that at least seven editors have stepped down so far in protest. Elizabeth Bik, a microbiologist known for studying doctored images in scientific manuscripts, also said she would resign from eLife’s ethics board.
Erlich had called on Eisen to apologize, but nonetheless posted that his dismissal was not the “preferred outcome.”
In a response to questions sent by Science, eLife expanded on its initial statement, adding “We regret that a number of editors have made the decision to resign as a result of both Mike’s tweets and our decision on the matter but firmly believe this decision is best to safeguard eLife’s future and reputation. We are aware of the open letter and we value and respect everyone’s right to freedom of speech. Particularly for those in leadership positions, exercising that right comes with responsibilities: an expectation to show good judgement and a duty of care to the communities they serve. We don’t believe those qualities have been demonstrated in this and previous instances.”
Eisen has previously been a frequent, feisty participant in debates about scientific publishing, doggedly supporting the development of free access to journal articles. In 2003, he co-founded the Public Library of Science (PLOS), whose journal PLOS ONE grew to become one of the largest open-access journals. Authors pay a fee so that their articles in PLOS journals are free to read when published. Eisen has criticized the paywalls still in place at many subscription journals as slowing the progress of science and the diffusion of useful findings. But critics of PLOS’s model have suggested author fees create an incentive for journals to maximize the number of papers published at the expense of adequate peer review and quality and can create barriers for authors with limited resources.
In 2019 he was named editor-in-chief of eLife—a selective, prestigious nonprofit journal funded in part by two of the largest research foundations, HHMI and the Wellcome Trust—where he continued to shake up publishing. In 2020, eLife started to require that all submitted manuscripts be published as preprints. In 2022, the journal said it would cease accepting or rejecting manuscripts for publication, instead offering only peer reviews of manuscripts; eLife charges authors $2000 per review and publishes the critiques whether positive or negative. Eisen described the move as making the peer-review process faster and more transparent and useful to readers than at traditional journals. But some observers have said the lack of a publication decision could come to hurt the journal’s reputation.
Eisen also launched a run for the U.S. Senate in 2017. “I’ve had a long and testy relationship with the scientific establishment,” he told Science at the time.
Sara Reardon contributed to this report.
Update, 24 October, 3:15 p.m.: This story has been updated to add new comments from Michael Eisen, eLife, and Molly Przeworski, and an update on the petition.