The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the nonprofit publisher of the six Science family journals, is announcing an update to its terms of open access publication. On a trial basis, AAAS will allow authors funded by cOAlition S organizations to place a CC BY or a CC BY-ND license on their accepted manuscripts.
AAAS has long held green open access policies for all five of its subscription-based journals, in addition to facilitating open access publication through its gold open access journal Science Advances (see: https://www.sciencemag.org/authors/open-access-aaas).
This approach reflects AAAS's concern that facilitating open access by gold routes alone puts undue financial obligation on authors, which could freeze in place or further exacerbate longstanding inequities for authors across race, gender, geographies, disciplines, and institutions.
The pilot for cOAlition S-funded researchers ensures these researchers can continue to publish in the Science family journals.
AAAS believes that contributions from a diverse pool of scientists are essential to advancing science, and is committed to helping lead the evolution of open access publishing in a manner consistent with our guiding commitments of supporting a more inclusive publishing ecosystem, while continuing to publish discoveries that change a field, advance the progress of science, and are of the highest quality of vetted research.
This policy will apply to any research submitted to the Science family subscription journals on or after 1 January, 2021 that was funded by those cOAlition S organizations that indicated adoption of the Plan S Rights Retention Strategy. This provision from cOAlition S states that an author's accepted manuscript, to comply with green open access routes, must be licensed for free distribution via a CC BY 4.0 license or a CC BY-ND license.
Recognizing that the open access landscape is evolving, AAAS will actively monitor how our change to support cOAlition S-funded authors impacts the scientific community - including effects on maintenance of the accurate record of published scientific content.
AAAS intends to continue to lead in understanding and responding to the shifting publishing environment. We are listening - to authors, to government agencies and foundations that fund these authors, to universities that employ and support these authors, to librarians who evaluate which research to deliver to their institutions, to reporters who communicate science, and to the public eager to learn about the latest scientific findings. We will work to more thoroughly understand underlying impacts of any shifts in our approach to these stakeholders, and to collaboratively define paths forward that serve collective needs.
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About the American Association for the Advancement of Science
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the world's largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science, as well as Science Translational Medicine; Science Signaling; a digital, open-access journal, Science Advances; Science Immunology; and Science Robotics. AAAS was founded in 1848 and includes more than 260 affiliated societies and academies of science, serving 10 million individuals. Science has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world. The nonprofit AAAS is open to all and fulfills its mission to "advance science and serve society" through initiatives in science policy, international programs, science education, public engagement and more.
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Science