Storify of Discussions About Shameless Behavior by #AAAS Relating to #Ebola Papers

Replaced with Wakelet

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:

Lessons from Ebola: Improving infectious disease surveillance to inform outbreak management 

• Mark E. J. Woolhouse, 
• Andrew Rambaut, 
• and Paul Kellam

Sci Transl Med 30 September 2015: 307rv5. [DOI:10.1126/scitranslmed.aab0191]

• 
  Abstract
 
• Full Text
 
• Full Text (PDF)

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:

Ebola vaccines face daunting path to approval 

• Jon Cohen and
 
• Martin Enserink

Science 18 September 2015: 1272-1273. [DOI:10.1126/science.349.6254.1272]

• 
  Summary
 
• Full Text
 
• Full Text (PDF)

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

How about #3:

Why infectious disease research needs community ecology 

• Pieter T. J. Johnson, 
• Jacobus C. de Roode, 
• and Andy Fenton

Science 4 September 2015: 1259504 [DOI:10.1126/science.1259504]

• 
  Abstract
 
• Full Text
 
• Full Text (PDF)
 
• Supplementary Materials

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.

No #AAAS and ASM you do not deserve good PR for freeing up a few papers on Ebola

Saw a PR from AAAS about how they were freeing up all of ~ 20 papers on Ebola

In light of what has become the largest Ebola outbreak on record, Science and Science Translational Medicine have compiled over a decade's worth of their published news and research. Researchers and the general public can now view this special collection for free.

OK. More access is good. But alas, they did not even free up all papers in #AAAS journals with Ebola in the Title or Abstract.

And then I started thinking. What about HIV? TB? Malaria? And as I started Tweeting about this, I saw that ASM also was hopping on the "free Ebola" bandwagon (actually I do not know who did it first).