PIXABAY, PETELINFORTHJournalist Philipp Hummel had been accessing embargoed materials through the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) press release repository EurekAlert for six years before he accidentally hit “publish” on a piece involving unpublished materials too soon. Following his embargo break this July, AAAS warned Hummel that his EurekAlert activity would be monitored until next month, he told The Scientist. Last week (September 11), the Die Welt editor received a strange direct message on Twitter from someone offering him access to embargoed press releases.
The Scientist: How long have you been using EurekAlert?
Philipp Hummel: Six years ago, that’s when I got my accreditation for EurekAlert, which is not so easy to obtain, as you probably know. I read in this Wired piece about the 20th anniversary of EurekAlert that it’s [like] an initiation rite or something for science journalists. Then, when this embargo break came, they wrote to me and said, You have six years of not breaking an embargo and that’s why we are . . . not blocking you directly but setting you on parole for 90 days, until the beginning of October, which I didn’t find so ‘fair,’ as they put it, but I was happy that they did not block me right away. That ...
