| 17 April 2007 | ||
| 4:00 pm | to | 5:30 pm |
PRODUCER: Veronique Morin, Alana Mitchell
CHAIR: Kathryn O’Hara
SPEAKERS: Pallab Ghosh, Phil Campbell, Geoff McFadden, Leigh Dayton
SESSION REPORT: Embargoed “till when?”
By Brendan Borrell
“The relationship between [science journalists] and the journals defines the way the rest of the world views science,” said Pallab Ghosh from the BBC.
He criticized journalists who pay undue reverence to scientific journals and let themselves be “spoon-fed readymade copy,” provided by the journal press releases.
He felt that the embargo system used by high profile journals like Science and Nature made journalists lazy and allowed a few powerful journals to dominate the media.
Ghosh directed several good-natured barbs towards fellow panelist Phil Campbell, editor-in-chief at Nature, who took the podium next to defend embargoes.
Campbell explained that Nature’s policy doesn’t prevent scientists from discussing their findings at conferences or posting papers on preprint servers, and journalists are free to report “process” stories. However, if the coverage is focused on an upcoming article then scientists must limit their conversations to journalists who will respect the embargo.
He said that recent criticisms of the embargo system really reflect problems in the newsroom; if anything, the embargo system helps more science get into newspapers.
Panelist Leigh Dayton of The Australian agreed: “If I say this journal Nature has a fascinating story on life on Mars, Venus, Mercury . . . then I have chance of getting a few paragraphs in the back of the paper.”
Perhaps the most insightful perspective came from the only scientist on the panel, Geoff McFadden of the University of Melbourne. McFadden studies malaria and described the “bizarre experience” of being bombarded with interviews in the days leading up to its publication in Nature in 1996. “Two days later, the story was done,” he said.
Research that had been completed over the course of two years was in and out of the headlines in a matter of days. That’s news.
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