Adam Penenberg, Time to Kill the Embargo, Wired News, December 23, 2004. The case against respecting temporary press embargoes on news releases, especially for science news. Excerpt: 'But do embargoes serve the public interest? I'm not alone when I say no. Vincent Kiernan, a senior writer who covers Information Technology for The Chronicle of Higher Education, believes that embargoes not only reduce competition, they foster fake newsworthiness. "Science works incrementally: two steps forward, one step back," said Kiernan, who wrote about press embargoes in his doctoral dissertation at the University of Maryland. He contends that there has been entirely too much coverage of new treatments, new therapies and new drugs, which the embargo system promotes. "Lavishing enormous attention on some small steps provides misleading information to the public," he said. Kiernan, who emphasized that he does not speak for the Chronicle, believes it is the journals and publicists who gain from the present system. So does Harvey Leifert, public information manager of the American Geophysical Union, or AGU, who rejects embargoes on principle, viewing them as a "game." In a recent article, [Leifert] wrote: "Scientific information does not belong to a journal; it was developed by scientists, usually with grants of public money, and has been reviewed by other independent scientists (an important function facilitated by journal editors). The goal, AGU believes, should be not to manipulate but, rather, to release this information as quickly as feasible." '
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/28/2004 10:51:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
