Did an advocacy group just take a step toward a dreaded “close hold embargo?”

On Monday, an email from a reporter landed in my inbox with a subject line that began: “FOR EMBARGO WATCH.” My immediate reaction was one of guilt; as readers know, I have not been able to find a fraction of the time I’d like to write here. But then I opened the email, and saw a curious thing.

Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, which is more than a little media savvy, was sending a letter to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Office of Human Research Protections (OHRP), criticizing how studies of ketamine had been conducted. Nothing all that unusual there; it’s the kind of thing the Health Research Group does regularly.

This is what struck my correspondent as unusual:

PNAS lifts embargo early on study of narwhals after CBC breaks it

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) lifted the embargo early today on a study of which marine mammals were most vulnerable to sea vessels on newly opened parts of the Arctic, after a story appeared on the CBC before the originally scheduled embargo time.

From an email from PNAS to its media list: