Here at ksjtrcker a roundup earlier this week of news on a report in PLoS ONE about how Alzheimer’s disease – or the version in lab mice to be more exact – spreads in the brain noted with curiosity that the NYTimes’s Gina Kolata was the only reporter who had wind of a second paper on the same topic. It even used much the same protocol, but is not yet published by the journal that has accepted it, Neuron. The post wondered how she found out and got hold of the author, all in general admiration of her having a more thorough story than others did.
The rest of the story seems to be coming clear, and has been spelled out by the diligence of Ivan Oransky at his exceedingly useful, inside-the-news-biz site Embargo Watch. ON reading his post one senses some internal friction at the journal over what happened, and perhaps some confusion over policy. The way it worked out, reports Oransky after making several runs at the principles involved, in brief is that the journal 1) Assumed it would not give the paper to anybody in media before its publication date, then 2) On hearing from Kolata that she had the gist of it and wanted to talk to the lead author at Harvard, gave her the green light, and then 3) Tried for awhile to keep the paper away from other reporters who asked about it.
One can’t have it both ways, Oransky writes. Actually, you can, as there are no laws in play here, but it’s not smart to try. If a journal grants a favored or lucky reporter exclusive first-access to a story, that’s its business. But once that reporter’s story is out, it is illogical, shortsighted, and apt to backfire if it then tries to hobble other reporters in their pursuit of the same information. The same goes for greenlighting interviews with the paper’s authors.
Still unclear is whether the journal actually threatened the author with having his paper dropped from the journal if he talked to other reporters after having done so with the famous reporter from the NYTimes. Oransky refers to the Ingelfinger Rule, invented in 1969 by Franz Ingelfinger to discourage authors of papers in the New England Journal of Medicine, where he was editor, from blabbing much to reporters before the embargo. Cell Press, publisher of Neuron, has in fact adopted a close approximation to the Ingelfinger Rule. One wonders: has it ever withdrawn a paper from publication due to media stories? Has it ever blacklisted authors who broke the rule? Does this policy have teeth, or is it just bluster to cow authors who might otherwise answer press question before publication?
Thank you Ivan. Kudos to Gina K. for her excloo. A big raspberry to people at Cell Press or Mass Gen and anybody else who sought to stop the rest of the press from reporting first-hand and verifying (or refuting) what the NYTimes already had. In an age of 24-hour blog and real news urgency plus open-access journals and wide circulation of scientific paper manuscripts among colleagues on line, The concept of routine journal embargoes is foundering. But it hasn’t sunk yet. What a pain it is in the meantime.
– Charlie Petit
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