Publicly funded research belongs in the public domain, says Michael Eisen, a computational biologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Labo­ratory. Along with Stanford biochemist Patrick Brown and Nobel Prize-winning oncologist Harold Varmus, Eisen founded the Public Library of Science, which is launching three new "open access" scientific journals this year. The publishers of paid-subscription journals such as Science, Nature, and Cell aren't laughing.

What's the state of open-access publishing today?
Depending on who's counting, 95 percent of research papers in the life sciences are still locked up by the big commercial publishers -- Elsevier, Springer, and the rest. It's ludicrous at a time when the Internet has pushed the actual cost of distributing a research paper close to zero.