Casting a critical eye on the embargo system: one year of Embargo Watch

This article originally appeared at The Association of British Science Writers.

It has been a year since Ivan Oransky, executive editor of Reuters Health, started Embargo Watch, "a long-term blog examining trends in embargoes and how they were affecting news coverage".

In his opening post on 23 February 2010 he said: "I’m going to try to keep track of anecdotes about embargoes. Are they helping journalists? Helping journals? Who’s breaking them? And, most important, are they helping the general public? My hope is that by chronicling these stories and trends, I can help make embargoes work better. For some [...] that may mean doing away with them. For others, it may mean refining them."

So, what have we found out about embargoes since then? Should we be sticking to them, do we need them and if so, why?

The usual line of argument is as follows. Proponents say that embargoes are necessary to allow journalists time to report in depth on topics that are not in their area of expertise. Critics point out that embargoed press releases can undermine this aim when the embargo period is too short or when the press release overemphasises a single study.

Press releases and embargo rules are more broadly criticised for corrupting the reporting of science.

Freelance journalist Stephan Van Duin says that embargoed press releases create artificial news events. He argues that science should instead be reported as the ongoing, never-ending enterprise that it is. The definition of science news has to be altered, and editors need to be involved in this, he says.

The oft-stated intention of embargoes is to give reporters time to write in depth articles about subjects that are often highly technical and to protect the depth of reporting from editorial pressures. Catriona Kelly, of the University of Edinburgh Press Office, says that embargoes "give me a deadline to work towards, which means I can prioritise my workload and do the best job possible in terms of getting each story that I deal with out to the press".

But this aim can backfire when embargo times are short, leading to an overreliance on the press-release rather than the actual paper. This can result in a selection of very similar articles appearing in a variety of outlets, something Martin Robins recently criticised on his Guardian blog in a post titled "This is a news website article about a scientific paper". Van Duin points out that "if that time isn't increased reporters will go for the lowest hanging fruit and that's when you end up with a bunch of identical stories".

The goal of giving journalists enough research time sometimes falls flat. The Embargo Watch has documented situations such as the 49 minute embargo, the Groundhog day embargo (that was repeatedly lifted every hour, dependening on the time zone the reporter was in) or embargoes on information that is already in the public domain. Oransky cites these as "some of the bizarre policies I've found while doing Embargo Watch". He now has an unofficial honor roll for the institutions that sort out their embargo policies and part ways with such bizarre practices.

Oransky also notes that "giving journalists time is at best an afterthought". Instead, it seems that embargoes are being used by journals to control information and improve their own cachet among both scientists and reporters. "For the most part, scientists like publishing in journals that get press attention. It means more glory, and more funding for their work. And embargoed journals get more press attention. The more attention-getting papers a journal publishes, the more reprints it can sell."

John Rennie, science writer and former editor of Scientific American, points out that because journals are businesses they have their own pressures to issue high-profile embargoed press releases: "Any journals that don't issue press releases risk being lost in the crowd of others that do."

Van Duin thinks that there is also a level of demand among media outlets "for sensation, for headline-worthy science news" that further raises the pressure on journals to control information in this manner.

Meeting the demand for science stories that make headlines has resulted in the ‘big paper of the week’ model of science reporting. Embargoed press releases result in coverage fixated on single studies or events as reporters try to ensure they do not miss the week’s big news.

But critics say the incremental progression of scientific discovery does not conform to the event-based reporting of current affairs journalism.

Oransky argues that embargoes are actually a distraction from the "bigger picture" which includes "conflicts of interest and flawed research investigations." There is also a danger that presenting science stories without the necessary context hinders the effectiveness of science reporting in contributing to readers’ understanding. Van Duin points out that "there is a lot to gain in contextualizing science – it's the only thing that is essential to science and at the same time mostly overlooked in science coverage in regular media."

Rennie has recently proposed, as a thought experiment, an "informal moratorium" on reporting studies for a six month period after their publication as a remedy to shallow media coverage of the "big paper of the week". Putting this idea into practice would be impossible but it does indicate what may be missing in science journalism at present. Science writer Ed Yong was inspired by Rennie’s proposal, and came up with an interactive timeline that put the latest news into a wider context.

Reducing reliance on press releases may lead to a decrease in churnalism – the rehashing of press releases without the addition of original reporting. The Media Standards Trust’s new project Churnalism.com, described on their website as "an independent, not-for-profit website built to help the public distinguish between journalism and ‘churnalism’", provides a graphic overview of the amount of copying and pasting that goes on in the media.

Some argue that if reporters waited to write about new scientific papers, scientific opinion about the paper would develop following its release and give reporters greater scope of opinion from scientists in the field. Currently, the presence of embargoes means that scientists in the field may not yet have read a paper when they are asked for an opinion on it. "This is what makes all those 'expert opinions' rather worthless," says Van Duin.

Rennie comments that his point behind his proposed thought experiment "was that the definition of science news that we editors and reporters use has typically become so narrow that it's almost inconceivable to us that we shouldn't fall over one another racing to publish a story at the moment an embargo ends. We don't question why a paper's publication suddenly makes it real news, and we don't push ourselves to find other ways to cover science."

Alice Bell, senior teaching fellow in the Science Communication Group at Imperial College London suggests a contrasting approach on her blog: she proposes an emphasis on ‘upstream’, science-in-the-making, reporting as a way to increase understanding of the scientific process.

But standing in the way of early-stage reporting of scientific research is the Ingelfinger Rule. This is a policy originally adopted by the New England Journal of Medicine to refuse to publish data that had already been published or publicised elsewhere: it has since been widely adopted by other journals as well.

Oransky feels that this policy has had a "chilling effect" on the dissemination of science.  He says that in the time he has run Embargo Watch he has come to think of embargoes somewhat differently. "The more I think about embargoes, the more I realize that the Ingelfinger Rule is the real problem," he says, pointing to scientists’ concerns that they will not be able to publish research that has already appeared in the media. This requires researchers to deal with a flurry of interest in their papers in a relatively short period around publication, reducing the time available to them to make insightful comments about their work.

Another worrying aspect of embargo-driven emphasis on single studies is a lack of transparency concerning which stories are selected for embargo. Journals choose to embargo the stories that they feel are likely to garner the most media attention, irrespective of the importance of the paper within the field. In other words, journal press officers are pitching their press releases to be as headline-worthy as possible. It can be easy for journalists to forget that press releases are not an unbiased source of information.

"Just because a paper says that it has found a ‘missing link’ or whatever doesn't mean that reporters should parrot that claim without checking it adequately," Rennie argues.

Although the ostensible purpose of embargoes is positive, they have had something of the opposite effect on science reporting, says Oransky: they have been "distracting reporters from the bigger picture".

Science coverage in the mass media is largely characterised by quickly written stories based on embargoed press releases. This might partly be because of the time and staffing constraints on the news desks; even without embargoes journalists would not have any more time to investigate and write a story. Solutions to this are not easy to devise, given the multitude of pressures on writers, journals and scientists.  Modification of restrictions on scientists communicating with the media prior to publication of their article may be the root of the problem, rather than embargoes per se.