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:

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Medscape and theheart.org get harsh sanctions for European Society of Cardiology embargo break

The European Society of Cardiology (ESC) has levied tough sanctions against theheart.org and its sister company, Medscape, for posting results of a trial a hours before the embargo was scheduled to lift. An email sent out by the ESC to its press list earlier today:

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:

Cell lifts embargo early on male birth control study because of “breach”

Mice — at least those who could read — learned about a successful male birth control pill for their species several hours ahead of schedule today.

From a Cell Press email at 11:30 a.m. Eastern this morning, half an hour before the scheduled embargo time:

PNAS lifts embargo early on Hansen et al extreme weather-climate change study after he publishes WaPo op-ed on it

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) has just lifted the embargo early on a paper by climate change scientist and activist Jim Hansen after an op-ed describing the findings ran in today’s Washington Post:

PLEASE NOTE: Due to the publication of an op-ed by James Hansen in Saturday’s Washington Post, the PNAS News Office has lifted the embargo on Article #12-05276: “Perception of climate change,” by Hansen, et al.

All other PNAS articles will retain a strict embargo time of Monday, August 6, 2012, at 3:00 PM EST.

Here’s how PNAS described the study in a press release:

The study concludes that the recent extreme summer climate anomalies would likely not have occurred in the absence of global warming. Continued warming could potentially make extremely hot summers the norm and possibly contribute to extreme droughts and floods, according to the authors.

Hansen specifically cites the study in his op-ed, “Climate change is here — and worse than we thought“:

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: