Remember, folks: It’s weird embargo time season

photo by Robbert van der Steeg via flickr

It’s like clockwork.

I wrote about “weird embargo time season” a decade ago, and here I am writing about it again.

Twice per year — once in March and once in November — parts of the world set their clocks either forward or backward on a different day than other parts of the world.

That means that for a total of four weeks per year, the standard embargo time for a journal may seem to be an hour different.

Science and its publisher, AAAS, no doubt know this, but even those of us who obsess think about embargoes a great deal can forget. Witness this message that went out from EurekAlert! yesterday:

Max Planck Institute press release breaks embargo on PNAS paper

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) lifted the embargo early on Friday on a paper because the corresponding author’s institute posted a press release days before the embargo was scheduled to lift.

According to an announcement from PNAS, in the paper, “Two systems for thinking about others’ thoughts in the developing brain,” “Charlotte Grosse Wiesmann and colleagues used MRI to examine cortical surface area and thickness in 38 three-year-old and four-year-old children.”