I assumed — incorrectly, as it turns out — that this was yet another case of the vexing PNAS problem, in which many of the papers that come off embargo on Mondays actually aren’t available on the PNAS site. That is irritating for reporters who want to link to papers, readers who want to learn more about studies, and authors who want to be able to discuss their work.

In fact, however, there seems to have simply been an error. The paper didn’t make it into the embargoed press list or the Early Edition table of contents, and yet this doesn’t seem to have been an embargo break.

Freelance science writer Lucas Brouwers tells Embargo Watch:

I saw someone tweet about the dinosaur nurseries, and came across multiple stories in major outlets (Guardian, Fox, up towards 82 currently published stories). But as I’m writing this (16:02 +1 GMT), PNAS has not released the paper yet.

One of the authors (David Evans) confirmed to me that the paper should have been released by PNAS by now, but it hadn’t. PNAS had contacted them and told them the paper will be released some time today.

PNAS confirmed today’s publication date for me, and said that

The dinosaur paper was published this week at the author’s request.

I’m still a bit fuzzy on what happened here. If the author is right — and the fact that PNAS isn’t treating this like an embargo break suggests he is — then what does it mean that the paper was published “at the author’s request?” I’ll try to find out more.

In related news, PNAS is surveying reporters about their media outreach efforts. When I fill out the survey – which I’d encourage all journalists to do – I’ll ask them to eliminate the “PNAS problem” once and for all. Their site is run by HighWire, which I know has that capability based on previous coverage.

Update: Here’s the paper.

Elsevier’s Monthly Research Selection is a monthly email developed by the Elsevier Newsroom which spotlights interesting, topical research articles for health and science press as part of Elsevier’s effort to promote authors and research findings through the media. The full text research articles are peer reviewed and have been publicly available for no more than 4-6 weeks (they are usually articles-in-press). They have not been press-released nor covered in the media (that we are aware of) and they are not embargoed. Formerly known as FLASH, the Monthly Research Selection is available to journalists at no charge through free access to Sciverse ScienceDirect, the world’s largest repository of scientific information.

The email goes on to briefly describe nine studies, ranging from using amniotic fluid to prevent surgical adhesions (in rats) to whether “religious people discount the future less.”

I’m noting this on Embargo Watch because, well, it’s not embargoed. That may seem like a small thing, but it’s not, in a world of media relations in which some journals and scientific societies — hell-bent on using embargoes to gin up interest — seem unable to grasp the concept that “freely available but embargoed” is a ridiculous contradiction that insults reporters who’ve agreed to embargoes in good faith.

In fact, as Elsevier was working on the relaunch of this newsletter, company spokesperson Tom Reller — with whom Embargo Watch and Retraction Watch have always had a perfectly professional relationship, even when we don’t see eye to eye — asked me whether I’d agree to an embargo on it when it came out.

Nope, I said. I liked the idea of highlighting papers reporters may have missed, even if they’re not in high-impact journals. After all, I review dozens of high-impact Elsevier journals every week that neither embargo nor press release any of their studies. But I couldn’t agree to an embargo on freely available content.

So I’m happy to see this iteration isn’t embargoed. And I’d encourage reporters who rely on studies to give it a look by contacting newsroom@elsevier.com to sign up. Why not break out of the embargoed study of the week model a bit? This doesn’t do that completely; after all, we still have to contend with the Ingelfinger Rule. But it’s a start.

For the uninitiated, here’s how veteran medical trade reporter Bob Finn describes the rule:

Franz J. Ingelfinger, M.D., (1910-1980) was editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) from 1967-1977. During his tenure he decreed that for an article to be published in his journal it must not previously have appeared elsewhere. The rule prohibited authors from releasing their results to the news media before the date they were published in the journal. A small number of other journals (such as JAMA) developed similar policies, and the net result is that scientists are often afraid to talk to reporters for fear that they’ll lose the opportunity to publish in JAMA or NEJM (or Nature or Cell or Science).

The new study, by Yale’s Fred Volkmar and colleagues, took a look at the likely effects of the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) criteria for autism. The fifth edition of the DSM is scheduled to be published in 2013, and has already been plagued by controversy. As the Times reports:

The new analysis, presented Thursday at a meeting of the Icelandic Medical Association, opens a debate about just how many people the proposed diagnosis would affect.

The changes would narrow the diagnosis so much that it could effectively end the autism surge, said Dr. Fred R. Volkmar, director of the Child Study Center at the Yale School of Medicine and an author of the new analysis of the proposal. “We would nip it in the bud.”

A DSM committee member told the Daily Beast that the Icelandic medical conference was a “notably random forum in which to present such findings:”

Here’s the policy, which the AACR tells me they’ll be announcing today:

The American Association for Cancer Research supports quality scientific journalism, and recognizes that comprehensive stories take time and careful preparation. Toward that end, the AACR Office of Communications often releases material early under embargo to credentialed journalists. This process requires trust and responsibility on the part of both parties.

Violation of embargoes puts that trust in jeopardy and the American Association for Cancer Research takes embargo breaks very seriously. However, we recognize that journalists and other media professionals occasionally make honest mistakes and we do not want these to permanently damage the relationship between the association and the media.

Therefore, each embargo break by a journalist or outlet will be investigated by the American Association for Cancer Research Office of Communications. If the break is determined to be accidental, we will expect the outlet to take internal steps to make sure their processes are corrected. After assurances both verbally and in writing that these steps have been taken, the AACR will maintain the press credentials of the offending organization.

However, repeat offenders will face sanctions including removal from mailing lists, dismissal from meetings and the possible removal of ability to cover future AACR events.

I asked Jeremy Moore, the AACR’s assistant director for science communications, what prompted the move, and whether it was spurred by a particular AACR embargo break. (Here’s the Embargo Watch collection of them, including one in which AACR broke its own embargo with a tweet.) He spelled out the organizations rationale in a thoughtful message that’s worth reading from start to finish:

There was no episode in particular that prompted this. Embargo breaks tend to be sporadic, but we had been struggling with a workable sanctions policy. Our office had been thoroughly investigating each embargo break and it always seemed to be the case that rather than the writer or editor who reported the news, it was the error of a posting editor down the line who didn’t read the time or date correctly.

I suppose anyone could claim something was a mistake, but my investigatory phone calls always resulted in prompt return calls from a senior editor who would offer to take it down, apologize profusely and make sure steps would be taken so that it wouldn’t happen again. If the gap between the break and my office knowing about it was short enough, then the embargoes would hold. If the outlet was too broad and the article was already all over the Internet, then we’d have to declare a break and proceed accordingly with the posting of the release, the announcement, etc.

The question was how do we sanction the folks who break embargoes? At the American Association for Cancer Research I am the primary contact with the scientific media. I have relationships with writers, editors and senior producers who cover our meetings and journals, write their stories, and then send the content down the line to their home offices where the mistakes usually happen. If I choose to cut off access, who do I ban? The writer? Or a posting editor in New York who I’ve never met, likely will never meet, and has likely been disciplined by his or her company already? 

Interestingly, for all the embargo breaks we’ve had (and you’ve reported on all of them) there has never been a repeat offender. This says to me that the embargoes are the results of mistakes that are corrected internally and made sure not to happen again. That’s the way it usually works in media and editorial, where I’ve worked my entire career, and I suspect what happens in other fields as well.

In public relations we talk all the time about “relationships.” Usually this means “who do you know?” But relationships, to be effective, have to have a level of trust. The AACR sends out embargoed materials to credentialed journalists because we trust that they will use the time to do the necessary interviews, vetting and research (not every medical reporter has an M.D.) to write complete stories that will educate the public and that they will sit on the news until the embargo breaks. 

Violate that trust once, and it’s probably a mistake. Violate that trust more than once, and you clearly don’t respect embargoes and your access to my office and to early materials will be severely restricted.

We wanted to sanction those who flagrantly violated, not those who made honest mistakes.

I applaud the AACR’s clarity here, just as I liked  a policy they were part of at a 2010 conference. Too often, organizations won’t say whether they’ll be punishing a particular embargo breaker — something the AACR has always been happy to tell me, with only one exception as far as I can tell. Or groups’ embargo policies have vague language suggesting sanctions may be imposed, but leaving so much leeway that in reality no one ever loses access.

It’s not hard to understand why journals and societies wouldn’t want to piss a reporter off, especially by denying access to the very material they want that reporter to cover. But that’s the point: A lack of sanctions just reminds me and other embargo watchers — and yes, they’re out there — that one of the main reasons for embargoes is to increase the chance something will get covered.

I’m not arguing for this kind of consistency because I want to find ways to make journalists’ lives harder, trust me. I think a “one time error is OK” policy is just fine. After all, I find some sanctions – such as those of Pat Anstett and Adam Feuerstein — indefensible.

But restricting the flow of scientific information — which, regardless of intentions, is what an embargo does — comes with a big responsibility to make sure that the conditions under which reporters agree to embargoes are 100 percent clear. This is a step toward that, so welcome to the Embargo Watch Honor Roll, AACR.

THE EMBARGO ON THIS STORY HAS BEEN BROKEN AND THEREFORE THE EMBARGO IS LIFTED EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.

 NEWS RELEASE

UNDER EMBARGO UNTIL JANUARY 17, 2012, 12:01 AM ET

 Contact:

[snip]

“Exergames” May Provide Cognitive Benefit for Older Adults

New Findings Reported in American Journal of Preventive Medicine

 San Diego, CA, January 17, 2012 – Virtual reality-enhanced exercise, or “exergames,” combining physical exercise with computer-simulated environments and interactive videogame features, can yield a greater cognitive benefit for older adults than traditional exercise alone, according to a new study published in the February issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. 

I’ve contacted the journal to find out who broke the embargo, and whether there will be sanctions. In the meantime, the first story I can find about the study was in the Daily Mail.

So – if people keep sending me embargoed press releases even when I do not ask for them, do I have to follow the embargo?

My response, as Embargo Watch readers could have predicted:

No, @phylogenomics, you don’t have to follow embargoes you never agreed to: bit.ly/d3KQ52 Re: bit.ly/yKfC1a

That first link was to a 2010 Embargo Watch post titled, “You’re doing it wrong: Sending material and calling it embargoed before an agreement doesn’t make it so.”

Apparently, Eisen agreed with me, also not surprisingly. And he was none too happy about the press release spam in his inbox — from a list from which he’d tried to unsubscribe. So he did something I’ve been expecting someone to: He posted the press release, in an item called “How to stop press release spam? Post embargoed PRs. Here’s one about Mayans using tobacco:”

I am sick of receiving dozens of unsolicited press releases, especially those in topics not related to my work.  So from now on I think I will be posting the press releases whether there is an embargo or not, since I did not agree to any embargo in these cases (see Ivan Oransky’s post at Embargo Watch about this).

I contacted Wiley, who publishes the journal in question — Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry — about Eisen’s post. They said they’d just picked up on it, and were figuring out what to do. Within two hours, they’d lifted the embargo. Here’s the top of the email that went out:

The embargo on this story has been broken and so the embargo is lifted effective immediately.

The embargo exists to ensure that as little time as possible elapses between media coverage of a news story and the full paper being available, and to provide journalists and others in the media with time to research and write about the story ahead of the article publication. We will now endeavour to publish the paper online as soon as possible to reduce this time.

In some sense, I’ve been waiting for this kind of thing to happen — not encouraging it, mind you, since I work at a large news organization and can’t afford to jeopardize all of my colleagues’ embargoed access – but expecting it. Brian Reid predicted something similar in an early guest post. Embargoes are porous, as I’ve noted before, and that’s particularly true when press lists turn out to be less clean than publicists would like us to think.

The episode is certainly a wake-up call for those publicists, who should probably invest some time and technology in vetting their press lists — and pronto. That’s important not just so Eisen and others’ inboxes don’t get clogged. Embargoing studies — which as I”ve noted before, benefits journals — carries a responsibility to make sure those embargoes are enforceable and well-managed.

And this doesn’t mean I think fewer people should have access to embargoed material, as I’ve also noted before. I just think that publicists shouldn’t be sending embargoed studies to anyone who hasn’t agreed to an embargo.

Update, 9 a.m. Eastern, 1/11/12: Wiley sent this in response to my question about how Eisen ended up on the embargoed list:

Jonathan was on our lists because we’ve been in touch before about a range of content that he was interested in. It seems we hadn’t appreciated that the focus of his interest is much narrower than we thought.

We recognise that sending people what they want and only what they want is a bit of a challenge, and we’ve been working on our systems and processes over the last few months. We will shortly be launching our new press room which has an embargoed login area and as part of this initiative we will be getting in touch with all of our contacts to offer them access and to find out how they want to work with us.

ANP’s story ran several hours before the PNAS embargo lifted at 3 p.m. Eastern.

EurekAlert, which distributes PNAS releases, told at least one news organization that they had contacted the publication and asked them to remove the article. That doesn’t seem to have happened before the embargo lifted. EurekAlert also contacted PNAS, but the journal was closed for the holiday, according to their alert last week.

ANP told one reporter that communications from the German press agency DPA had confused the issue. The German agency

had the news with an embargo until January 2, 2000 (!). After that, there came a new message without embargo, so it seemed to me there was no embargo. If PNAS did have an embargo, then this wasn’t clear from the DPA message.

As of noon Eastern on Tuesday, the study is not yet available at the PNAS site. In the meantime, you can read Ed Yong’s great post on it. Bonus: A study participant responds in the comments.

Hat tips: Lucas Brouwers and Elmar Veerman

Photo b jma.work via Flickr http://bit.ly/tbxvYX

The end of 2011 has snuck up on me, and there’s not much time left for a Best of 2011 post. So I’ll just call attention to the scientific societies and journals that did something to earn a spot on the Embargo Watch Honor Roll this year. These are all organizations who changed their policies following Embargo Watch criticism:

• The American Diabetes Association, for doing away with a “freely available but embargoed” policy at its meetings
• The American Astronomical Society, for doing the same
• The New England Journal of Medicine, for deciding to provide draft abstracts of papers to give reports more time
• The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, for reversing itself on a move that would have made reporters into stenographers
• The journal CHEST, for changing a “freely available but embargoed” policy on its advance online papers

As I’ve noted before, there’s plenty of room on the Honor Roll, so I look forward to adding members in 2012.

Some of you may have noticed that the volume of posts has gone down this year. The fact is, a good chunk of the time I’d spent posting on Embargo Watch in 2010 was devoted to sister blog Retraction Watch in 2011. The success of the latter, thanks in no small part to the great audience Embargo Watch helped build, and the lessons it taught me about blogging, is a good thing. But I’m going to do my best to pick up the pace again in 2012.

Happy New Year.

Let’s face it. News is often a stressful business that can literally leave you in pain. The hours spent racing deadlines while hunkered over your desk definitely take their toll.

To help you usher in 2012 with a little less pain, DISC Sports & Spine Center (DISC) has two gifts for our media colleagues:

1. The Brookstone Orthopedic Back Cushion, a pressure-relieving memory foam pillow designed to provide soothing lower back relief whether you’re on the job, in the car or at home…

And there, in the box containing the letter, was the cushion. I couldn’t find the exact cushion on Brookstone.com, but here’s something very similar that retails for $40.

Someone, it appears, hadn’t read my post on what not to do in a PR campaign. Granted, this wasn’t $400 in gift cards and electronics, but still, it’s not a product sample for review. (The second gift was an expert list, which is a perfectly good thing to send reporters.)

So I emailed the person who’d sent the letter, Kristien Brada-Thompson of Priority PR, and told her we couldn’t accept the cushion, thanks to reasonable Reuters policy (and good journalistic practice). Was this something she did often?

No, not something we’ve done regularly…a first time in conjunction with the holidays. I understand if you need to return it and apologize for any inconvenience.

I appreciate the quick response, but I hope this is the last time Priority PR tries this sort of thing. At the very least, should a clinical practice really be passing onto patients the cost of $40 times however many reporters got this?

Dear Reporters,

We would like to inform you that the embargo on the following article featured in the press release below has been lifted as our publisher has posted the article online to Neurology’s website at www.neurology.org.   Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience.

Here was the top of the original release, sent out on Tuesday:

News from the January 3, 2012, NEUROLOGY® Print Publication

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4 P.M. ET, MONDAY, JANUARY 2, 2012

New Clues as to Why Some Older People May Be Losing Their Memory

Neurology did the right thing here, of course, just as they did in February when they broke their own embargo on their March issue.  Their press office tells me they’re looking into why it happened again, and regret the error.