Archive for February 2010
“Yes, I’ll honor the f—ing embargo”
I have lifted the headline of this original post at BoingBoing, since I really didn’t think I could improve on it. If you have ever been hounded by a PR staffer about a revolutionary breakthrough that will only be revealed to you if you agree to an embargo, this one’s for you. Some colorful language, but perfectly safe for work if you’re wearing headphones or ear buds.
Hat tip to @edyong209
Good intentions, unintended consequences at American Thoracic Society
One of my staff writers was sitting down a few weeks ago to report out a study from The American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine (AJRCCM) when she noticed some small print at the top of the cover page: “Media embargo until 2 weeks after above posting date.” The page also directed reporters to the embargo policy.
The paper was an advance online publication, and the policy was just a few weeks old, it turns out, so it wasn’t unexpected that I hadn’t noticed it before. What was unusual, however, was that I wasn’t accessing the paper in question through a press site. I was accessing it through HighWire, a Stanford University service that many publishers use to make electronic versions of their journals available.
In other words, according to this embargo, the press can’t write about papers for two weeks while they’re freely available to any HighWire subscriber — and that’s a lot of doctors at a lot of medical schools and hospitals.
This was a new one for me. Embargoed papers not being available to anyone but the press, sure. But available to many doctors — and anyone doctors showed them to — for two weeks before we could write about them? Read the rest of this entry »
Why write a blog on embargoes?

image by http://www.hetemeel.com
A few weeks ago, I wrote a guest post for the Association of Health Care Journalists’ Covering Health blog. In a nutshell, I told the story of an episode involving competing embargoes from the Cochrane Library and the Annals of Internal Medicine and wondered aloud about whom medical journal embargoes are really serving.
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. Read the rest of this entry »