No self control? Daily Mail story forces PNAS to lift ideology-self control paper embargo early

For the fifth time this year, PNAS has lifted the embargo early on a paper today because of a story published before the embargo was scheduled to lift. About an hour before the 3 p.m. Eastern embargo, the journal sent this to its press list:

A tipping point? Nature angers science journalism corps with short Kennewick Man embargo

It took 9,000 years for the remains of Kennewick Man to be found in 1996, nearly a decade of legal wrangling with the government for scientists to gain the rights to study him, and almost another decade for researchers to reveal his secrets.

But this week Nature, in a move that irritated a number of leading science journalists, decided that the news just couldn’t wait several more days so that reporters would have time to digest the details of what one journalist accurately described as “an incredibly complicated subject.”

As usual, we’ll leave the analysis of the results to the stories by journalists focused on the paper itself. Here’s some of the abstract, to provide a bit of context:

Another embargo break at PNAS, this time by author press release

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) lifted the embargo early Monday on a paper after the company where some of its authors work broke it in a press release. Here’s a notice from the journal to the media on Monday, a few hours before the scheduled 3 p.m. Eastern lift:

PNAS is lifting the embargo early on the following paper. All other articles are under the scheduled embargo:

Article #15-06207: “Precision-guided antimicrobial peptide as a targeted modulator of human microbial ecology,” by Lihong Guo et al.

PNAS tells Embargo Watch: