Patience is a virtue: Gastroenterology association changes embargo policy five years after criticism

More than five years ago, I took the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) to task for what I considered an ill-advised embargo policy in which scores of “article in press” papers in their journals were freely available online, but considered “embargoed.” And while change often comes slowly, it does in fact come.

Last month, the AGA changed their policy. In an update dated September 16, the association writes: 

King’s College London takes responsibility for date snafu that led to apparent embargo break

On Monday morning, Newsweek’s Elijah Wolfson asked me a question on Twitter:

Hey @ivanoransky can you check out what happened with the broken embargo on this @KingsCollegeLon study on moles/melanoma?

— Elijah Wolfson (@elijahwolfson) October 19, 2015

Wolfson was asking about this BBC story. So I checked things out, and learned that the apparent break wasn’t the BBC’s fault. The King’s College press office tells Embargo Watch:

Richard Branson…conscientious embargo breaker?

Richard Branson, via Wikimedia

There’s a puzzling embargo-related story playing out about someone whose name I didn’t really ever expect to see grace the pages of Embargo Watch: Billionaire Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group.

Here’s what seems to have happened: This morning, Branson published a blog post at Virgin.com that began: