(Issue 5; posted April 5, 1997; archived April 18, 1997)

In my previous Press Box article I expressed the opinion that embargoes are good for scientists and journalists, but that the Inglefinger Rule - one of the means by which scientific journals enforce embargoes - is good only for scientific journals, which endeavor to keep their brand names before the public eye.

(Readers of my previous article will recall that embargoes are agreements among journalists, scientists, journal editors, and institutional public relations people in which the journalists agree not to publish or broadcast a story until a designated time, in return for advance notice from the others on important science stories. Journals subscribing to a version of the Inglefinger Rule, originally promulgated by a former editor at the New England Journal of Medicine, will not publish scientific articles that describe results that have previously been published elsewhere, including the popular press.)

But are the days of the embargo numbered? Have the Internet and other rapid means of information dissemination rendered this institution obsolete? I think that embargoes will likely survive, at least for a while, but I think that the Inglefinger Rule is doomed.

At least two Internet sites - and possibly more - provide embargoed news releases from a wide variety of scientific and educational institutions to journalists, and neither has had a major problem with broken embargoes. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has established a service called EurekAlert!, and Roger Johnson, an entrepreneur and science writer, has established a site called Newswise. Both EurekAlert! and Newswise take steps to keep embargoed information out of the hands of non-journalists. EurekAlert!, for example, keeps embargoed information in a section of the site that's accessible only by password, and passwords are given only to people who prove they are journalists and who agree not to publish embargoed information prematurely.

One source of worry about such arrangements is that some people who are not journalists occasionally attempt to gain access to embargoed information. Johnson, for example, has had several financial analysts attempt to sign up to receive embargoed information. Another is that some classes of journalists, such as business writers, have far less respect for embargoes than do science writers. The increasingly broad intersection between science and business may make it impossible to keep certain classes of scientific information under wraps under embargo rules.

Let me illustrate this with a personal anecdote from one of the most remarkable chapters in recent scientific history: the cold fusion debacle. At the time I was working as the senior science writer at the California Institute of Technology. Caltech physicists and electrochemists were among the first to try to duplicate the exciting claims announced at a press conference by University of Utah researchers, and they were among the first to debunk these claims.

During those brief few weeks, the emotions of researchers all over the world rode a roller coaster as promises of cheap, abundant energy were first raised, then dashed. But there was an equivalent financial roller coaster as well. The commodity price of the metal palladium, which the Utah researchers claimed was a necessary component of the electrodes in their device, first soared and then sank.

One of the Caltech researchers performed for me an amusing back-of-the-napkin calculation demonstrating that an unscrupulous person with a little advance knowledge could easily have turned $10,000 into $10 million. All he would have had to do would be to buy palladium futures on margin before the original announcement, and sell them short, again on margin, before the debunking. (I hasten to add that the researcher had no information indicating that this had actually happened.)

Although I'm no expert in securities law, my guess is that profiting on embargoed scientific information would be a form of illegal insider trading. And modern science must provide abundant temptations. To give just one more example, the announcement of a successful clinical trial can cause a small biotech company's stock price to shoot into the stratosphere. If the company's PR person mails embargoed news releases to several hundred of his trusted journalist friends, some of those people, perhaps thoughtlessly, might tell some of their friends and relatives, who might choose to profit on the knowledge.

Considerations such as these may decrease the use of the embargo, but they won't kill it completely. Companies and individuals announcing financially sensitive information, scientific or not, simply cannot take the chance that an embargo will hold. This type of information will just be released without embargoes, and reporters without the luxury of lead time will just have to scramble to get their stories ready for tomorrow morning's edition.

While I expect the embargo to survive into the indefinite future, I doubt that any strong formulations of the Inglefinger Rule are long for this world. Three nails in the coffin of the Inglefinger Rule are on-line preprint repositories, list servers and Usenet newsgroups, and even humble E-mail. Let's examine these one by one.

Physicists have long found on-line preprint repositories to be very valuable in encouraging the rapid dissemination of new scientific information, but physicists are fortunate in that few if any physics journals use the Inglefinger Rule. The Alzheimer Research Forum is considering a preprint repository, but before plunging ahead its organizers are surveying its membership.

In the survey they write, "Although an electronic preprint repository would benefit the research community as a whole, it is perceived to impose various costs on the individual, in particular by placing him or her in conflict with journal publishers, and by eliminating the delay between paper acceptance and publication, which many researchers view as valuable 'lead time' providing them with an edge over competitors." If the Alzheimer Research Forum decides to go ahead with its repository, will Science and Nature and Cell and the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association all refuse to print articles on Alzheimer's disease that had first appeared in the repository? If so, the Inglefinger Rule may end up having the paradoxical affect of decreasing the influence of those journals.

Another popular means of discussing preliminary scientific results are the hundreds of E-mail-based mailing lists (list servers, often called "listservs") and Usenet newsgroups . Almost all of these have completely open subscription lists, allowing scientists, science writers, and financial analysts alike to subscribe. The full text of all messages on many of these groups are archived on the Internet at sites like Deja News. Suppose in the midst of a Usenet discussion a graduate student innocently mentions the latest result out of her lab. Does that constitute prior publication in violation of the Inglefinger Rule? If a journal finds out about it, will they refuse to publish an already accepted article?

And what about ordinary e-mail? Suppose Dr. Smith writes a note telling her close friend Dr. Jones about her latest result. Suppose Dr. Jones is so excited that she immediately copies Dr. Smith's message to fifty or five hundred of her closest friends. Does that simple E-mail message, propagated without the author's knowledge or consent, constitute prior publication in violation the Inglefinger Rule?

For these reasons, I think that journals should just bow to the inevitable and simply eliminate their Inglefinger Rules. If a journal continues to publish top-notch science, its reputation will remain intact. It won't need the artificial boost to its brand-name recognition that these rules provide. The Inglefinger Rule has certainly outlived any usefulness it may have once had.

Robert Finn is a contributing editor for The Scientist who has written for many publications including Discover, Science Digest, and the Los Angeles Times.