Scooped

Pennsylvania State University's Stephan Schuster is devastated, reports Science after his work on sequencing the cacao genome and the Tasmanian devil was upstaged by rivals' announcements. As our Science roundup points out, Schuster says he and his colleagues were waiting until after their work went through peer review to promote it, rather than doing what many call "science by press release." By waiting, Schuster says, "we tried to be a good citizen ... and we lost." The news report adds hyping a project ahead of time likely won't affect its chance of being published. "As long as the paper contains new insights that are not in the press release, then there is minimal [negative] impact," says Baylor's Richard Gibbs, who is also an editor at Genome Research.