Time to abolish embargoes?

Time to tell the world about your work…but not just yet. Russ Swan on the unnecessary nuisance of scientific embargoes. 

The latest in a series of computer hacking revelations has thrown into sharp relief the bonkers world of scientific embargoes – and may paradoxically have boosted interest in some otherwise mundane research findings. Hacking has become a modern plague, with a number of high-profile cases recently. Once thought to be the preserve of the geeky misfit working alone in a bedroom, it has become an industrial activity motivated by profit and politics.

The greed factor certainly appears to have been behind the infamous Ashley Madison database hack last year. An online dating service for people seeking extramarital affairs, the site claimed to have tens of millions of users and promised them ‘100% discretion’. Sadly for them, the hackers who stole 60GB of information including names, email addresses, and credit card details had absolutely zero interest in discretion.

This summer, the private database of the World Anti-Doping Agency WADA was hacked, and confidential medical details of a number of top Olympic athletes was released. None of the information revealed any illegality, but even Olympians have a right to some medical privacy. The motivation here seems entirely political, with many suspecting the attack was thinly-veiled revenge by the Russian state after a number of its athletes were banned from taking part in Rio 2016.

“Nyet. Ve are not Russian” claimed one of the hackers from the group calling itself the Fancy Bears. That sounds convincing to me. I mean, it’s not as if they named themselves after the most iconic symbol of Russia or anything. And so we come to last month’s hack of the largest scientific embargo clearing house, Eurekalert. This impressive database is operated by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and includes tens of thousands of publication notices from around the world, on everything from astronomy to zoology.

Many of the 200 new announcements it publishes each day are under an embargo of anything from a day or two to a couple of weeks. Access to these is restricted to people with appropriate credentials, mainly established reporters, but once the embargo lifts the content is available to anyone with a web connection. The embargo system works adequately, most of the time, but is far from perfect and is I think long overdue an overhaul. Its main purpose is to allow journalists and writers to prepare material for publication, before the science upon which the story is based is officially published in a peer-reviewed journal. This should mean that science reports are more accurate, and perhaps include additional information gleaned from the paper’s authors. The system breaks down completely, sometimes farcically, on regular occasions and is prone to abuse.

Last month I saw an embargo notice attached to a press release, which read: ‘This news is not under embargo for social media. You are free to talk to your local press and trade press on Thursday. It is embargoed in the national press until 8am on Sunday 11 September…’ Now, this wasn’t on Eurekalert and wasn’t about scientific research, but it tells us a lot about the embargo mentality. The national press don’t read Twitter, apparently. Rather more worrying is when embargoes are slapped onto potentially life-saving information. The Annals of Internal Medicine ran a topical article in February this year, offering advice about the best methods of preventing the spread of Zika.

This is important stuff – but no recognised news outlet, and no reporter who wanted to preserve their credentials, could publish anything about it for FIVE DAYS. The journal applied its routine embargo, because that’s what journals do, and meanwhile if a few more people got infected well that’s just tough.

This, clearly, is unacceptable. When embargoes are broken, as happens regularly, the various parties involved flap about for a day or two and may amend an embargo date or lift it altogether. If the transgressor is a publication, it loses its privileges. Most often, though, it is the scientists or the journals that break their own embargo.

When CERN was preparing to announce the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2013, it broke its own code of silence by publishing a video discussing the news, a couple of days before the official announcement. Anybody who saw that video had every right to discuss it, because it was now in the public domain, but the now-futile embargo remained in place. In the case of the Eurekalert hack, the motivation is hard to fathom, unless it is a fixation that the ‘establishment’ is conspiring to withhold the ‘truth’ – which is somehow contained in the two embargoed papers that were leaked. One of these came from the University of Sussex, and was about the effectiveness of surgeons using Google Glass-type smart glasses; the other was from the University of Montreal and revealed that watching too much TV puts children at risk of social isolation.

Hang on – isn’t this where we came in? If there’s no financial or political motive for the hack, I’d guess the main reason must be simple mischief. The sort of thing perpetrated by a geeky misfit. Who probably watches too much TV.

Russ Swan