Publishers love their embargoes, whether they’re of papers that aren’t open access yet, or are available to the media before they’re published. Apparently, however, they also break embargoes, just like the journalists they sometimes sanction for the same sin.
Take Oxford University Press, which publishes the journal Physical Therapy for the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA). Late last month, the journal temporarily withdrew eight papers because, well, the publisher broke the journal’s embargo. Jan Reynolds, the APTA’s managing editor for the journal and director of scientific communications, explained to Retraction Watch that
These articles have not been retracted. They are part of a special issue. In error, against embargo instructions, Oxford University Press’s typesetter posted these articles online, and we made a decision to temporarily withdraw them until all of the special issue articles are ready to be released together. We are currently reconsidering this decision, as it has caused confusion.
Here are the eight articles:
- Wearables for Pediatric Rehabilitation: How to Optimally Design and Utilize Products to Meet the Needs of Users
- Embodied Cognition in Practice: Exploring Effects of a Motor-Based Problem Solving Intervention
- Development Through the Lens of a Perception-Action-Cognition Connection: Recognizing the Need for a Paradigm Shift in Clinical Reasoning
- Assessment of Parent-Child Interaction Is Important With Infants in Rehabilitation and Can Use High-Tech or Low-Tech Methods
- Safety and feasibility of transcranial magnetic stimulation as an exploratory assessment of corticospinal connectivity in infants after perinatal brain injury: an observational study
- An Eye-Tracking Method for Directly Assessing Children’s Visual-Motor Integration
- Validating accelerometry as a measure of arm movement for children with hemiplegic cerebral palsy
All of them include this retraction notice:
This article has been temporarily withdrawn due to a broken embargo. It will be published in full and without modification in the near future, along with the rest of the content for a themed issue on pediatric rehabilitation. The journal’s typesetter, working on behalf of the publisher, regrets this error.
Publishers are not, of course, immune from error.
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