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| Volume 46, Number 3, Winter 1998-99 |
by Howard J. Lewis
You would have thought that all the pros and cons of the embargo system used to defer public announcement of journal articles had been thoroughly explored. There was the Ingelfinger Rule of the New England Journal of Medicine, and, later,—in response to continuing complaints from reporters, the Relman Clarification, and, more recently, the Kassirer Elucidation. In its issue of 31 October 1996, Nature had spelled out for both scientists and journalists the hazards of reporting major scientific discoveries before publication:
Nature’s guidelines for potential authors at [scientific conferences] are clear-cut in principle: talk to other researchers as much as you wish, but do not encourage or risk premature publication by discussion with the press, beyond your formal presentation. That advice may jar with those (including most researchers and all journalists) who see the freedom of information as a good thing. But it embodies a longer-term view: that publication in a peer-reviewed journal is the appropriate culmination of any piece of original research and an essential prerequisite for public discussion.
And just two years later, in its 10 October 30 1998 issue, Science editor Floyd Bloom, after warning prospective contributors to forgo previous publication in print or on the Internet, said pretty much the same thing:
Science holds the view that…organized dissemination of important information through the public press leads to better quality coverage and public scrutiny of the achievements of scientific research. The embargo period provides sufficient time for reporters to analyze and report on the often complex stories behind the data… Conclusive evidence that a reporter has knowingly broken our embargo will result in his or her exclusion from future embargoed information. Authors who fail to keep their manuscripts privileged risk annulment of acceptance…
What made that issue of Science extraordinary was a 10-page spread by Eliot Marshall and James Glanz on the embargo phenomenon in all its intricacies and complexities (full text available at www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/282/5390/860).
Since most embargo systems are imposed by publications on the media rather than through mutual agreement, Rick Borchelt of Vanderbilt University, and Lynne Friedmann of Friedmann Communications (and managing editor of ScienceWriters), organized a workshop at the 1999 NASW meeting to (a) look at one embargo arrangement that had been crafted between scientists and reporters by mutual agreement and (b) invite staff from Nature, Science, and the National Academy of Sciences to respond to issues raised by reporters about their embargo procedures.
Recalling a different era, Dave Perlman of the San Francisco Chronicle, and Cristine Russell of the Washington Post described an extraordinary agreement fashioned by the organizers of the 1975 Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA and a group of about 16 reporters. The conference itself was extraordinary. First, it dealt with a research advance almost mythical in its potential impact—a relatively simple procedure for rearranging the genetic structure of living matter. Second, it brought together a group of potential Nobelists contemplating an unprecedented moratorium on that line of research until its relative safety could be demonstrated.
The conference planners envisioned limiting press attendance to Science and Nature, but both the subject and venue of the meeting were already known to reporters. Responding to the ensuing pressure, the organizers proposed that press attendance be limited to reporters willing to accept an embargo on all publication until the conclusion of the three-day meeting. Some 16 signed onto that agreement, press briefings were held twice daily, and the embargo stood firm, even despite the appearance of an Associated Press story midway through the meeting based on an isolated report that appeared in a local daily.
Both Perlman and Russell held positive recollections of the affair, noting that benefits to the reporters included not only extraordinarily accurate and lucid coverage but also at least one major writing award, several successful books, and a marriage of two participants who met in the press room. [A detailed account of press arrangements at the Asilomar conference was published in the February 1985 issue of ScienceWriters.]
A succeeding panel on the current system was less positive. Robert Lee Hotz of the Los Angeles Times asked if the system hadn’t broken down. He read off a depressing record of recent events:
Last November, Scientific American printed as its lead item a report on an embargoed research paper in Nature Medicine by scientists at the Salk Institute about the ability of human brain cells to regenerate. According to lead researcher Rusty Gage and the editors of Nature Medicine, Scientific American broke both the embargo with Nature and a personal agreement with Gage, who consented to an interview with the magazine on the condition that it did not run until after the paper was made public.
Several days later, U.S. News & World Report scooped the journal Nature on an embargoed study of Thomas Jefferson and the paternity of the descendants of Sally Hemings. U.S. News had the story by its own enterprise, all agree. Even so, Nature moved its embargo up to that Sunday, robbing U.S. News of its exclusive. The timing of the release—on the eve of a critical US mid-term election—prompted accusations that the Nature scientists were playing politics.
In mid-November, Nature again moved an embargo, this time concerning the discovery of dinosaur eggs and embryos. Nature lifted its news embargo three days early to coincide with a press conference by National Geographic and The American Museum of Natural History. Nature, however, ignored the fact that National Geographic had already featured the research on its cover in an issue that had reached subscribers the week before.
It was the second time in six months that National Geographic imposed an embargo on the general press that left its commercial partners free to exploit the same information without competition. Last summer, the magazine embargoed news of the discovery of the wreck of the aircraft carrier Yorktown, even though, through its partnership with National Public Radio, it had already started broadcasting a three-part series on the research and its Web site had been covering the discovery for weeks.
Even as Nature was sliding back its release date to accommodate National Geographic, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences moved the release date of a research paper on angiogenesis forward almost two months to coincide with an embargoed research paper being published in Science. All the PNAS editors had on hand was an uncorrected manuscript; even so, they released it—as best as one can tell—to avoid being upstaged by a competitor.
In December, the Daily Express broke the embargo on research scheduled for publication in Science about the success of Japanese researchers in cloning cattle. The newspaper and the reporter involved obtained their advance copies of the research through the EurekAlert! Internet site, which provides advance copies of research from more than 30 peer-reviewed journals and embargoed press releases from universities to some 2,000 science writers who have registered with the site. Then, on the explicit instructions of a Daily Express assignment editor, the science reporter deliberately broke the embargo.
After first confirming the details of the embargo break with the newspaper and the reporter, EurekAlert! suspended the Daily Express, five staff reporters and two freelancers who work there from receiving embargoed news through the Web site for six months. I do not know what - if anything, Science did on its own to enforce its embargo.
Last January, Geron scientists and collaborators at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center published in Science their success in using the telomerase gene to extend the life span of human cells grown in culture. Normally the announcement of the results would have been withheld until the end of the trading day on the eve of publication, but the Alliance for Aging Research broke the embargo by describing the experiments in a press release. On the day the embargo was broken, the stock climbed 43 percent.
In at least three other documented cases in recent months, embargoed research scheduled for publication in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association and Science has leaked to stock analysts well before the embargoed release dates. That resulted in a significant run-up in stock prices that allowed a privileged few to profit from the public’s ignorance.
Hotz expressed dissatisfaction with the response of the New England Journal when queried: that policing stockbrokers was not their problem. Hotz argued, “If the issues are [getting to stockbrokers] early, then the New England Journal embargo is meaningless because the research is already public days before the official release date…
“Why…should any reporter honor an embargo system if the organization setting the restriction does not…hold the embargoed information as tightly as possible?
“…In this age of instantaneous Internet communications, on-line trading and 24-hour news cycles, we no longer may have the luxury of waiting until material is actually published in print prematurely or disclosed in a formal broadcast. The Los Angeles Times will consider an embargo broken the instant it is apparent that the news has traveled outside the circle of those who have agreed to the embargo. And we want that circle to be as small as possible….
“The problem before us is not that embargoes get broken…[T]he system operates surprisingly well, [but] as the recent record shows, the journals often are playing games with the embargo system. So our problem may be that reporters and editors do not sanction those journals that do not themselves take the embargo system seriously enough.
“I suspect that peer-review publications may be afraid to enforce serious sanctions against offending networks or other major news outlets because that would effectively cost them the free publicity the arrangement is designed to generate for them…
Hotz concluded, “Perhaps this is something that the NASW as a body might care to address.”
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Doug Levy, a technology reporter for USA Today, agreed with Hotz and added a distinction between “real” embargoes and those that were merely self-serving—such as a Sunday 6 p.m. release on a Congressional report that was obviously aimed at network news programs. In such cases, he said, embargoes were ignored and competing media duly notified. He had similar reactions to publisher’s embargoes on books that had already been distributed to book stores. Finally, he argued, embargoes did not work on stories too hot to hold onto—such as an attempt by the Journal of the American Medical Association to embargo a story about firing its own editor. [See pp. 9-11]
Monica M. Bradford, Science managing editor, said that any media violating an embargo would no longer receive advance texts unless it acknowledged its misdeed with a letter of apology. She added, however, that embargo breakdowns are often not the result of media malfeasance, but that of some other organization—the research site, funding organization, or scientific society. These violations, she acknowledged, are harder to punish. As for prior presentation at meetings, she said that Science allows scientists to talk to media at the meeting, but not to hand out copies of the paper or slides: “We want the scientists to decide where they want to publish.” [Cris Russell noted later that there was a “fine line between ‘author’s choice’ and intimidation.”] Bradford added that Science is considering publishing papers on the Internet as soon as they are ready for publication; then, embargoes would be timed by the paper’s electronic appearance (possibly with a different stated hour for each time zone!).
Laura Garwin, speaking for Nature, declared that the journal takes abuse of embargoes most seriously: “Let us know of any violation; sanctions will surely follow!” She stressed the embargoed journal’s benefits to reporters: It saved reporters from having to wade through endless preprints on the Web, and journal publication provided immediacy to an otherwise indeterminate discovery process, enabling a reporter to declare: “It was announced today….” In response to a complaint in the audience, she said that Nature now plans to notify pertinent public relations offices of research universities and supporting agencies of embargoed releases.
Susan Turner-Lowe, director of the National Academy of Sciences news office, suggested that the acceptance by over a thousand reporters of an embargo agreement with the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences implied “a new world order,” made even more telling by Rick Weiss’s report that the Washington Post now saves news holes in Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday editions for embargoed articles from the major weekly journals.
Routine issuance of embargoed news releases drew criticism from Doug Levy on the grounds that they were likely to be tossed without reading by reporters unable to keep up with the daily flood. Turner-Lowe reported complaints from some press contacts about announcements issued for immediate release. She invited the media to reach agreement on the matter and let her know.
Howard J. Lewis is the editor of ScienceWriters.