Calling on Nature Publishing Group to return all money received for genome papers and article corrections

Well, let's see if Nature Publishing Group actually does the right thing here.  A few days ago I showed that they were charging for access to "genome sequencing" papers that were supposed to be freely available (see Hey Nature Publishing Group - When are you going to live up to your promises about "free" genome papers? #opengate #aaaaaarrgh).  And in researching this I then discovered that Nature Publishing Group has been charging for access to corrections of articles (see Nature's access absurdity: Human Genome Paper free but access to corrections will costs $64 and Corrections Scamming at Nature: Tantalizing clues, to see errors just pay more money #Seriously?).  

Multiple people from NPG have posted on my blog and twitter that they are working on "fixing" these issues.  By which I think they mean "We will make these freely available again."  But this is not a full fix.  NPG really needs to do a self audit and return ALL money that anyone has paid for access to these articles.  Charging for something that is supposed to be free is not a good thing ... and if they want to really fix the issue they need to give any money they got for these papers back.  Note - I already called for them to do this last year when I wrote about the genome papers not being free.  But I never heard back.  Please help put the pressure on them to do the right thing this time.

New #openaccess paper in G3 from my lab w/ many others on 'Programmed DNA elimination in Tetrahymena' #CiliatesRule

A new paper in which the lab was involved has been published recently (just found it though it is not in Pubmed yet): Genome-Scale Analysis of Programmed DNA Elimination Sites in Tetrahymena thermophila.  It was a collaboration between Kathy Collins, multiple Tetrahymena researchers, the Eisen lab, and the UC Davis Genome Center Bioinformatics core (Joseph Fass and Dawei Lin).  The paper is in G3, an open access journal from the Genetics Society. 



This stems from the project I coordinated on the sequencing and analysis of the macronuclear genome of the single-celled ciliate Tetrahymena thermophila.  This organism, like other ciliates, has two nuclei - one called the micronucleus and one called the micronucleus macronucleus.  In essence you can view the micronucleus as the germ line for this single-celled creature and the micronucleus macronucleus is akin to somatic cells.  The micronucleus is reserved mostly for reproduction.  And the micronucleus macronucleus is used for gene expression.  In sexual reproduction, haploid versions of the micronuclear genomes from two lineages merge together just like in sexual reproduction for other eukaryotes.  After sex the offspring then create a macronuclear genome by taking the micronuclear genome and processing it in a variety of ways - going from 5 chromosomes for example to hundreds.  Plus many regions of the micronuclear genome are "spliced" out and never make it into the macronuclear genome.  Our new paper focuses on trying to better characterize which regions of the micronuclear genome get eliminated.


For more on our past work on Tetrhymena genomics see here which includes links to much more information including to my 2006 blog post about our first paper on the project. 


Note - the work in my lab on the sequencing was supported by grants from NSF and NIH-NIGMS.