Prime ministers trump embargoes: PNAS takes unusual step with lost Cambodian city paper

Want to see more papers published without embargoes? Just get heads of state to talk about them.

Yesterday, at about 5:30 p.m. Eastern, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) sent out this message to its press list:

CDC lifts embargo on Lancet HIV study early after Reuters inadvertently breaks it

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) lifted the embargo early on a study appearing in The Lancet following an accidental break by Reuters.

From a 3:12 EDT email from the CDC press office:

Irony? Guardian piece promising “there can be no turning back now” removed “because it was launched too early”

Three or four times per year, a Google Alert lands in my inbox revealing a story in The Guardian that has been removed because it broke an embargo. One of those arrived today, so I tweeted a link to the story.

While looking at that page, Emily Lakdawalla noticed that a number of the related stories — presumably generated automatically — were also “removed.” One in particular caught my attention.

The headline said:

New York Times breaks PNAS wine-climate change study embargo

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) has lifted the embargo early on a paper on the effects of grape growing on biodiversity after a New York Times story went live hours before the scheduled embargo.

Here’s a note that went out to the journal’s media list earlier today:

ASCO tweaks conference embargo policy

The annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) is closely watched by reporters and Wall Street analysts alike, and that usually makes it good fodder for Embargo Watch. ASCO has changed its embargo policy regularly over the years, and this year is no exception.

According an email sent to reporters earlier this month:

PREVAILing (lack of) wisdom: Embargoes laid bare in a mess involving Boston Scientific (and a lot of others)

By now, Embargo Watch readers will probably have heard about Boston Scientific’s PREVAIL study of the Watchman stroke/clot prevention device, findings of which were scheduled to be presented at the American College of Cardiology (ACC) meeting on Sunday but weren’t, thanks to an embargo break by the company.
As theheart.org reported:

New York Times breaks embargo on study of web searches and drug side effects

The New York Times broke the embargo earlier today on a Stanford and Microsoft Research study of whether tracking Internet searches can help researchers identify drug side effects.

Here’s the story from the Times, “Finding Hidden Side Effects, With Web Search Data,” which went live sometime before 5:30 p.m. Eastern. The study, in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, was embargoed until 3:30 Pacific, or 6:30 Eastern.

And here’s the top of the press release:

Is this the scientific embargo version of insider trading?

If you’re a health reporter like I am, you may be familiar with emails with subject lines like this:

For Monday @ 4:00 PM Expert Ophthalmologist (Dr. Mark Fromer) RE: EMBARGOED – Study Suggests Association Between Regular Aspirin Use, Increased Risk of Age-Related Macular Degeneration

The email, sent on January 18, continues:

Le Devoir loses embargoed access for three months after breaking CIHI embargo

For the second time in less than two months, the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) has sanctioned a news organization for breaking one of its embargoes.

In December, the QMI Agency, publisher of the Sun newspapers, earned a six-month suspension. Last Thursday, the subject of this email was Le Devoir, a French-language newspaper out of Montreal, CIHI tells Embargo Watch:

PNAS lifts embargo on Neanderthal carbon dating paper after break

PNAS is lifting the embargo on a study whose authors say raises big questions about when Neanderthals died out. From their email sent a little while ago:

Due to an embargo break, PNAS is lifting the embargo early on the following paper. All other articles are under the scheduled embargo: