Important changes to DSM-5 Development website: Draft proposals and criteria removed

Important changes to DSM-5 Development website: Draft proposals and criteria removed

Post #208 Shortlink: http://wp.me/pKrrB-2wk

Update: November 16: Webpages on the DSM-5 Development site that were no longer accessible, yesterday, via the home page or a Proposals tab menu but were still accessible via their URLs have today been placed behind a log  in.

Following closure of the third and final DSM-5 stakeholder review, revisions made by the 13 Work Groups and Task Force to proposals and criteria for DSM-5 subsequent to June 15 are subject to embargo.

You can read the DSM-5 Permissions Policy here  (Updated: 5/30/2012).

The DSM-5 Development site Terms and Conditions of Use can be read here (Effective Date: June 21, 20120).

The Terms and Conditions of Use page has not been updated to reflect very recent changes to the website.

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Removal of proposals for DSM-5 categories and criteria

I have a webpage change detection service set up for the home page and selected pages of the DSM-5 Development site.

Today, November 15, I was notified that the DSM-5 Development home page text has been recently edited.

The home page text has been revised and the 20 links towards the foot of the home page text to Proposed Revisions have been removed, as has the drop-down tab menu for Proposed Revisions, Rationales, Severity Specifiers for the 20 DSM-5 category sections.

The revised home text can be read here.

The home page text as it had stood prior to recent editing can be reviewed (for a while) on this Google cache page.

[…Google’s cache of http://www.dsm5.org/ . It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on 4 Nov 2012 21:50:47 GMT…]

The DSM manual and its clinical and research criteria sets are a major cash cow for the publishing arm of the APA.

APA is protecting its intellectual property rights by removing draft criteria as they had stood at June 15, 2012 and in placing an embargo on interim revisions to the texts, prior to publication of the final categories, criteria sets and associated textual content, next year.

Consequently, draft proposals, criteria, rationales, severity specifiers and for some categories, PDF files expanding on proposals and rationales, as they had stood at the time of the third draft, are no longer available for review or for comparison with earlier iterations of the draft directly from links on the site’s home page text or from links in a Proposals tab drop-down menu along the top of the home page.

According to the DSM-5 Development home page and recent commentary from Task Force Chair, David J Kupfer, MD, DSM-5 remains on target for release in May 2013.

No recent projections for the date by which an online version of the DSM-5 is expected to be available, post publication of the print edition, have come to my attention but it is anticipated that access to any online version of the manual would be available via subscription – not as a freely accessible public domain version, as ICD-10-CM and ICD-11 will be when they are published and implemented.