After a typhoon delays publication of a paper, PLOS ONE tries to re-embargo the work, then reverses itself

House et al (2020) PLOS ONE, CC BY

On Wednesday, November 25, a bit after 2 p.m. US East Coast time, when the embargo on a PLOS ONE paper had already lifted, the journal’s press office sent this message to reporters:

The American Diabetes Association seems to be confused about what “public” means

Last month, the American Diabetes Association (ADA) stepped in it a bit.

In a move that predictably richocheted around Twitter — and into the medical trade press — the ADA politely, but publicly, asked attendees of its recent annual meeting to take down photos they’d posted of conference slides. Tweets were fine, as long as they didn’t include pictures of slides.

The policy — a version of “freely available, but embargoed,” drew widespread and deserved criticism. In response, the ADA’s Linda Cann defended the policy, but said it would be reevaluated:

PeerJ broke its own embargo on brontosaurus paper — and that’s exactly what they meant to do

By now, if you follow science news, you have no doubt seen coverage of a new study claiming that yes, Brontosaurus really is a dinosaur.

That study appeared in PeerJ, a relatively new journal (which, in the interests of full disclosure, has asked me to review a paper). The reason you’re reading about it on Embargo Watch is that several reporters were a bit dismayed to see that the study had been published at PeerJ some time before its scheduled 7 a.m. Eastern embargo today. As Nature’s Ewen Callaway tweeted:

Anger, confusion as Popular Science inadvertently broke blue planet embargo

Ethan Siegel was not pleased last Wednesday:

Finally, some honesty! Journal: “rationale trumps logic” for our “freely available but embargoed” policy

Last week, I was going through studies in the Journal of Urology — a journal I like to cover for its rigor and because it publishes a lot of papers that question the status quo in urology, despite being owned by the American Urological Association — and I saw something on “Accepted Manuscripts” that I hadn’t seen before:

All articles printed in The Journal of Urology® are embargoed until 3 PM ET the day they are published as corrected proofs online. Studies cannot be publicized as accepted manuscripts or uncorrected proofs.

This notice appeared on studies that were quite clearly posted online. And that meant this was an embargo of freely available material.

So I wrote to the journal’s editor, and the AUA press office:

Society of Vertebrate Paleontology clarifies its “pre-published online” embargo policy

The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) will hold its 72nd annual meeting in Raleigh, NC in October. Everyone loves dinosaurs, so if past experience is any indication, there will be plenty of press coverage of the meeting.

With that in mind, the SVP outlined its embargo policy on page seven of the program PDF:

Sugar makes embargoes stupid, and doesn’t do wonders for a press release, either

Sugar makes rats stupid, and apparently studies about sugar render people unable to handle embargoes properly.

A message today, about a Journal of Physiology study about how sugar affects learning in rats, from UCLA media relations staffer Elaine Schmidt:

Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine plays “freely available but embargoed” game — with a Groundhog Day twist

The Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine’s (SMFM’s) annual meeting was last week in Dallas, and, as many societies do, the press officers working for “the pregnancy meeting” put out a number of releases about what would be presented there.

But unlike many societies, who understand what an embargo means, the SMFM decided it would be fine to post those releases publicly before the meeting, but call them “embargoed.”

That left Rachael Rettner, a former student of mine, a bit perplexed. So she sent me a message, and I in turn sent Bendure PR a note to ask for clarification. The response didn’t actually clear anything up:

What should physics writers do about the arXiv “freely available but embargoed” problem?

Photo via hetemeel.com

Imagine you’re a writer covering physics. (Or, if you’re a writer covering physics, just be yourself for the moment.) Now imagine you came across a paper called “Disruption of a Proto-Planetary Disk by the Black Hole at the Milky Way Centre” that got your mind’s juices flowing. The abstract looks really interesting, so you’re about to click on the PDF link when you see this:

Radiological society lifts video games-violence study embargo early after “break,” but abstract was freely available online

In what has become a familiar refrain on Embargo Watch, a scientific society is trying to claim that a news organization that never agreed to the society’s embargo violated its policy because a study was freely available online before the embargo lifted. Here’s a message sent this morning by the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA):