Embargo Watch has been around for a decade and more. From author Ivan Oransky’s first post way back when:
If you’re unfamiliar with embargoes: You’ve probably noticed that every major news organization — including mine, Reuters — seems to publish stories on particular studies all at once. Embargoes are why.
A lot of journals, using services such as Eurekalert.org, release material to journalists before it’s officially published. Reporters agree not to publish anything based on those studies until that date, and in return they get more time to read the studies and obtain comments.
That would seem to be a good thing for science and health journalism, much of which is reliant on journals for news because it’s peer-reviewed — in other words, it’s not just a researcher shouting from a mountaintop — and punctuates the scientific process with “news events.”
Vincent Kiernan doesn’t agree. In his book, Embargoed Science, Kiernan argues that embargoes make journalists lazy, always chasing that week’s big studies. They become addicted to the journal hit, afraid to divert their attention to more original and enterprising reporting because their editors will give them grief for not covering that study everyone else seems to have covered.
But even if embargoes are a necessary evil, they’re not uniform, and how each organization deals with them provides case studies in some of the chinks in embargoes’ armor.
As a fan of obscure facts, it’s interesting to see what other people think is worth blogging about.
