Tuesday, November 03, 2015

Does #AAAS care about #Ebola anymore? Nope. And probably never did. #ClosedAccess

In October I wrote a blog post criticizing AAAS (and ASM) for trying to give themselves a pat on the back for making a few papers about Ebola freely available: The Tree of Life: No #AAAS and ASM you do not deserve good PR for freeing up a few papers on Ebola.  The whole thing was a publicity stunt.  And AAAS in particular tried to play up how they were doing this for the benefit of humanity.

So today I decided to check back and look into whether AAAS was making new papers on Ebola freely available. So I searched for the word Ebola in the title or Abstract 

The most recent seemed interesting:


Surely AAAS must still care enough about Ebola to make new papers freely available right? Nope. $20 to rent for a day



How about #2:


Seems useful and worth reading if one works on Ebola.  Free right?  Nope: $20/day



How about #3:

Seems peripherally relevant to Ebola but I would not mind if more Ebola workers read this.  Free right?  Nope.  Guess how much? $20/day


And so on.  A few in the first 10 were, at least for now freely available.  But overall it seems, AAAS and Science have decided Ebola is no longer important.  So much for helping the world.

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