It’s ASCO time: Cancer group announces its embargoed press program

Ordinarily, you won’t catch me writing an item or story about a press release, or even based solely on a press release. In fact, I rail against such practices when it comes to clinical studies.

But here at Embargo Watch, there’s at least one release worth writing a post on: The American Society of Clinical Oncology’s, or ASCO’s.

Well, it’s happened: Reuters Health accidentally breaks JCO embargo

After more than two-and-a-half years of Embargo Watch, it was bound to happen.

Yesterday, the team I lead at Reuters Health unintentionally broke the embargo on a study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO), in a story titled “Early end-of-life talks tied to less aggressive care.” We set to the story to post at the JCO’s regular embargo time of 4 p.m. Eastern on Monday, but the study was actually embargoed until 4 p.m. today because of the Veteran’s Day holiday in the U.S.

ASCO, which publishes the JCO, sent this to reporters about an hour ago:

FREEDOM! AHA lifts embargo on bypass vs. stent study after its vendor breaks it

The American Heart Association (AHA) has lifted the embargo early on a study being presented at their annual meeting in Los Angeles after their own vendor accidentally sent out a release early.

From an email that went out at 7:46 p.m. Eastern tonight — just 12 minutes before the scheduled lift:

NEJM clarifies: Yes, saying journal is about to publish is breaking an embargo

If someone who has agreed to an embargo policy publishes a story about a paper that’s still under embargo — or tweets specifics about it — it’s hard to argue that’s anything other than a break. But what if said person just says something’s about to published?

The answer, from an email about embargoed material from the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) today (bolding was NEJM’s):

Stenographers, anyone? GMO rat study authors engineered embargo to prevent scrutiny

A study of the effect of genetically modified corn on rats that you may have read about earlier this week doesn’t seem to have said much about whether GMOs are safe. But it sure said a lot about how the scientists who did the work used a crafty embargo to control their message.

In an excellent post over at the New York Times’ Dot Earth blog, Andy Revkin says the study co-sponsored by the Sustainable Food Trust, is yet another example of the “single study syndrome:”

AAP refuses to lift circumcision recommendation guideline early despite coverage

On Friday, Tablet, a magazine about Jewish news, ideas, and culture — full disclosure, I’ve written for them — published a story titled “American Pediatric Group Endorses Circumcision.” The piece was based on a ” leaked copy of the new American Academy of Pediatrics’ policy statement on circumcision, scheduled to be released on Monday” and:

The short embargo makes a (brief?) comeback

Longtime Embargo Watch readers may remember one pet peeve of mine that seemed to come up a lot early on: The short embargo. In a nutshell — the short version, you might say — I wondered aloud a lot about how embargoes of less than 24 hours could possibly help reporters do a better job, as journals claimed their embargo policies were designed to.

I beat up on the short embargo offenders, notably the New England Journal of Medicine, which remains the undisputed champion with an embargo of 49 minutes. Since then, to the credit of journals, including NEJM, I haven’t seen very many short embargoes.

A few brief ones this week, however, put the issue back on my radar.

Item 1: An email sent by Emma Mason on behalf of the School of Medicine & Dentistry, Queen Mary, University of London a few minutes before 5 a.m. her time Monday, August 20:

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:

Circulation breaks its own embargo on non-nutritive sweeteners statement, forcing early lift

The American Heart Association (AHA) has lifted the embargo early on a statement in one of their journals after learning that the journal, Circulation, had published the paper and tweeted about it before the 4 p.m. Eastern embargo was scheduled to lift.

Larry Husten, at CardioBrief, broke the news about the early lift in his post on the statement,

Unintended consequences? What the new ASCO embargo policies have wrought

Brian Reid

Brian Reid is a former reporter for Bloomberg who’s now a director at PR/communications firm WCG. He’s written three guest posts for Embargo Watch: one on how the embargo system could break, another on what moving science reporting upstream could mean for embargoes, and a third on what would happen if medical and science reporting was more like legal reporting. In this post, he takes a look at the effects of changing embargo policies at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting.

Until 4 years ago, late May was a colorful time in the world of biotech. Shares of companies developing cancer drugs would gyrate wildly in advance of the beginning of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting, despite the absence of any public information. The force behind the “ASCO Effect” was Ivan’s favorite bugaboo: the embargoed-but-publicly-available farce. In mid-May, thousands of oncologists would receive copies of all ASCO abstract, which were technically under embargo. Naturally, this information found its way to the financial markets, creating a headache for almost everyone but the traders.