The Tree of Life: Calling on AAAS to Deposit all Archives of Science in Pubmed Central

“Much has been written recently about a call to boycott Elsevier due to their outrageous policies regarding academic publishing.  I support the boycott but I also agree with many others who have said it perhaps unnecessarily singles out one publisher over others who also have publishing policies that could, well, use a bit of work.  And one such publisher is AAAS - the American Association for the Advancement of Science... the annual meeting of AAAS begins today in Vancouver... AAAS has some policies regarding openness that I believe are unnecessary and not in the general interest of scientific progress.  One is the strange ‘talk embargoes’ I have written about recently.  Another, which is much more problematic, is the fact that Science Magazine (published by AAAS) does not deposit archival content in Pubmed Central... But for reasons that are not entirely clear (to me at least, or to a Google search), AAAS clings to their archival material making it only available through their own web site... AAAS's policy seems unnecessarily closed accessy and limits the impact and spread of the knowledge contained within papers in Science.  I note - this policy is yet another reason to not publish in Science and to instead choose either fully open access journals or ones that at least release their stranglehold on the papers after a short delay. Today I call on AAAS to make archival literature from Science Magazine available in Pubmed Central.  And I call on others out there, such as those at the AAAS meeting, to pressure AAAS to do this.  Write blog posts.  Call and email AAAS members and leadership.  Email AAAS...”