About ten years ago, Michael Eisen embarked on a mission to blow up the academic establishment. Eisen—a voluble geneticist at Berkeley—had become obsessed with the notion that the most prestigious scientific journals, the kind that make careers and confer legitimacy upon the published, were working against the very mission of science.

His theory goes something like this: The “glamour magazines,” as he calls them, have been around forever. Nature since 1869, Science since 1880. Not many of their circulations top 100,000—small by the standards of commercial media—but since scientists and science journalists need access to new studies to do their jobs, the journals can basically charge whatever they want, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars for a single title annually.

But that’s not the worst of it, in Eisen’s view. He believes the journals are also strangling the pace of research itself. A scientist will usually submit a paper to the most prestigious publication possible. For the next several weeks or months, she will wait to hear if it has been deemed worthy of consideration—in which case it will be sent out to other academics for further evaluation. If the paper is rejected, the author will try the next relevant journal, still seeking to maximize “impact factor,” a crude measure of influence based on the number of times a journal’s papers are cited in other scholarly publications. And so on down the food chain.

“If your goal were to get your work out to your colleagues as fast as possible,” says Eisen, “you’d be better off loading your paper onto a rocket ship, sending it to Mars, and beaming it back to Earth.”

Eisen’s first attempt at bucking the system didn’t go well. In 2001, he and a biochemist pal organized a boycott of “the bad publishers” that refused to make their archives available in the public domain. They encouraged “all scientists of all nations” not to publish, review, or subscribe to the offending journals. More than 22,000 of their colleagues complied in theory—but since researchers actually need to publish to advance their careers, most of them balked.