Cloak-and-dagger publishing.

71 SPECIALSECTION could escape from a lab and cause a human pandemic, or that revealing details about the research could inadvertently aid terrorists seeking a bioweapon. They asked the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, set up after the 2001 anthrax attacks, to review the H5N1 studies. It initially recommended that the papers be published only if journal editors deleted key methodological details and shared them only with " responsible " scientists. In the end, however, such selective censorship proved both practically and legally impossible, and a divided advisory board ultimately supported full publication of both studies, which appeared in print last year. The episode has left a mark on science. For instance, it prompted the government of the Netherlands to take the unusual step of requiring researchers there to obtain an export permit before sending their fi nal manuscript to Science in the United States—a precedent for government oversight of data sharing that worries some scientists. And it prompted the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world's biggest biomedical science funder, to impose extensive new rules. NIH-funded researchers and universities now must undertake special reviews of proposed studies that involve H5N1 and more than a dozen other risky biological agents and toxins. The goal: to identify experiments that might produce sensitive " dual use " fi ndings that could be used for good and evil—and force alterations or even stop them before they begin. If NIH were to fund a study that meets the dual use defi nition, the agency announced in August, researchers must create " risk mitigation " plans that include strategies to control sharing sensitive results. And they must allow NIH to see manuscripts and abstracts at least 10 days prior to submission to a journal or meeting. Such prior review requirements are already common in academic studies funded by industry, which is keen to patent profi table ideas before they become public, and military agencies, which aren't eager to aid adversaries. Still, some researchers fear that NIH's adoption of prior review for a new swath of academic science could signal a creeping expansion of bureaucratic controls. Journal editors and legal specialists say it's not clear whether the U.S. government can legally block publication of NIH-funded data unless it takes the radical step of classifying them as secret. Such questions may not be resolved for some time. In the short term, the new rules are …