Volume 47, Number 1, Spring 1999

PRESIDENT'S LETTER

by Joe Palca

THE FOLLOWING IS FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.

For many of us, there is a vague tendency to dismiss news releases with those words at the top, searching instead for the far more appealing EMBARGOED ADVANCE INFORMATION FOR 31 DECEMBER 1999. The embargo system is seductive. For daily/hourly/ instantaneous journalists, it eases the risk of being scooped by a hated rival. For those working on a weekly schedule, it makes it possible to bring immediacy to a story while still working with a three or four day lead time. (I don't know what writers for monthly journals do: I've always suspected they were smarter than the rest of us, and had no need for the crutch embargoes provide.) And for PIOs, adding an embargo to a release gives it that air of importance and timeliness that will make reporters pay attention.

But embargoes have their obvious drawbacks as well. Nothing is more infuriating than to dig up a juicy science story, call the principal investigator, and be told you can't have an interview until the paper is published in Science or Nature or wherever. Embargoes tend to be a disincentive for enterprise journalism. Why chase after news when perfectly good stories are served up on a silver platter complete with telephone numbers of the key investigators, stories your editors will complain if you don't do?

Embargoes are a little bit like the weather. Everybody likes to complain about them, but nobody does anything about them. Well, I believe there are signs that the embargoes may not be around that much longer, something that frankly scares the bejeebers out of me. It's not that I'm worried about living in a world without embargoes. Embargoes are an artificial construct, and science stories with merit will still get published or broadcast, just not all on the same day. No, it's the chaos that will ensue in the transition to an embargo-free world that will have us all jumping around like headless chickens, as we lose the relative order embargoes have forced on the science- news world.

Why do I think embargoes are heading for the same fate as the dodo? Two basic reasons: the stock market and the Internet.

One of the arguments for creating embargoes in the first place was to eliminate the vagaries of the mail service. With so many journals going on line, that problem will disappear. But even more than that, the spirit of open communication in which the Internet was born is at odds with the very notion of embargoes. Physicists were the first to post pre-prints of articles on the 'Net, but other disciplines have and will follow that practice.

Many individual researchers post information about their research as a matter of course. I recently covered a Science paper about environmental influences on mouse behavior. A visit to one of the author's Web sites revealed most of the information contained in the embargoed paper.

Ultimately, these practices will become so pervasive that embargoes will cease to have meaning.

The other pressure will surely come from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Embargoed materials are finding their way into the hands of stock analysts who appear to be quietly passing them on to clients. Even now it's possible to see small blips in stock prices days before a major journal article appears, suggesting that someone knows something.

This practice is illegal. Nature puts the following message on all their embargoed releases: "Warning: This document, and Nature papers that it refers to, might contain information that is price sensitive (as legally defined, for example, in the UK Criminal Justice Act 1993 Part V) with respect to publicly quoted companies. Anyone dealing in securities using information contained in this document or in advanced copies of Nature's content may be guilty of insider trading under the US Securities Exchange Act of 1934." This may help for a while, but in the end, as it grows harder to squeeze profit out of already inflated stock market, aggressive traders will be looking for an edge. Perhaps the SEC will crack down, in the interest of preserving the embargo system. But I suspect the more likely outcome is that it's the embargo system that will succumb.

Joe Palca can be reached at National Public Radio, 635 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20001; phone 202-414-2776, fax 202-414-3329, e-mail jpalca@npr.org.