Michael Eisen, editor-in-chief of the prominent open access journal eLife and a 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 tweeted today. 

The furor began on 13 October when Eisen, a geneticist at the University of California, 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.”

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Criticism of Eisen, who is Jewish, immediately erupted, but the scientist, who is known for being provocative, did not retreat. A day later, he tweeted, “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 the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), publisher of eLife, not to remove or censure Eisen over his tweets. “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.

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“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, and as soon as we see that, the whole thing will come crashing down.” Dubnau went on to question whether eLife would define acceptable positions on other controversial issues, such as abortion or the war in Ukraine.

Dubnau, who is Jewish, says the letter has received about 420 signatures so far, including from a mixture of junior and senior scientists. He says many junior scientists have privately contacted him to thank him for speaking out, but are afraid their own careers would be negatively impacted if they say anything publicly about the conflict in Gaza.   

Shortly after Eisen’s announcement today, Lara Urban, a reviewing editor and early-career advisor for eLife, tweeted 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. “[I]t validates cyber-bullying as a successful and legitimate tool to get scientists with controversial opinions fired.”

Erlich had called on Eisen to apologize, but nonetheless tweeted today that his dismissal was not the “preferred outcome”.

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.

This is a developing story. Science has reached out to HHMI and eLife for comments. Sara Reardon contributed to this report.