 |
 |
||
 |
|
||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||||||
|
The Planetary Society BlogBy Emily LakdawallaEris and embargoes (or: don't fear Ingelfinger!)Oct. 12, 2011 | 14:49 PDT | 21:49 UTC
Last Tuesday at the Division of Planetary Sciences meeting Bruno Sicardy presented the results of his research group's observations of a stellar occultation by Eris. Stellar occultations are the main tool that astronomers have at their disposal to discover the physical properties of bodies too small and distant to resolve. Properties like diameter, albedo, and (if a mass can be determined by timing the orbit of a moon) density can all be determined by precisely measuring how long it takes for a distant body to pass completely in front of an even more distant star, as long as the occultation is observed by at least two ground stations.
It's also on the smaller end of the possible size range reported for Pluto. So who's bigger? At the conference, Sicardy said "It could be smaller, it could be larger; basically, it is a twin." They are a bit different inside -- Eris is 27% more massive than Pluto, so must contain more rock -- but diameter-wise, they're the same. Yet Eris and Pluto currently look very different, because Pluto is close enough to the Sun (at 30 AU) to support a thin atmosphere with a pressure of approximately 10 microbars, while Eris is so far away (at 90 AU) that it does not. Specifically, Sicardy calculated from the occultation data that if it has an atmosphere, it has a density no greater than one nanobar - less than a ten-thousandth of the pressure of Pluto's. But this might not always have been (or will be) true. Eris' unexpectedly small diameter but surprising brightness implies, Sicardy said, that it is possibly the second-brightest surface known in the solar system, after Enceladus; its albedo is very nearly 1.0. This is even brighter than freshly fallen snow (albedo 0.8) and way brighter than water ice clouds (0.55). Sicardy speculated that what we are seeing on Eris is a collapsed atmosphere -- the final frost on a deeply frozen world. In time, when Eris approaches its perihelion near 40 AU, its atmosphere will unfreeze and it will really be a twin to Pluto. Returning to the diameter question, Sicardy said, "If you take into account Pluto's atmosphere, it is clearly bigger. In a century or two it will be reversed."
This is an excellent example of the stifling effect that embargoes, and especially the Ingelfinger Rule, can have on the public discussion of science. Some of you might be wondering what an embargo is exactly, and I would guess that most of you don't know what the Ingelfinger Rule is, so this seems like a good time to explain them both. Actually, I'm going to let Ivan Oransky do most of the explaining. Oransky pens a blog titled Embargo Watch. First, what is an embargo? In the inaugural post of his blog, Oransky said: "A lot of journals, using services such as Eurekalert.org, release material to journalists before it's officially published. Reporters agree not to publish anything based on those studies until that date, and in return they get more time to read the studies and obtain comments." Publicly, journals state that they issue material under embargo in order to help journalists and improve the quality of reporting on scientific findings. In practice, what embargoes wind up doing is cause many news outlets to suddenly release essentially the same story on the same article at the same time, the moment the embargo is lifted. Everyone seems afraid be the outlet not reporting on the embargoed story. The stories very frequently contain little independent reporting; often they largely parrot the language developed by the journal to hype the paper. This relates to what I've written before about how press releases drive reporting on planetary science news. But so far it doesn't have anything much to do with conference presentations. So let me explain where that comes in. Scientists' presentations at conferences typically involve work that is in progress, which has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Fairly often, as in the case of Sicardy's presentation on Eris, a scientist submits a paper for publication in the time between submitting an abstract to a conference and the actual date that they present at the conference. By giving a paper at a conference, they are essentially giving a preview of work that is soon to be published in a journal. There are several journals -- typically, the most prestigious ones in their fields -- that have very strict policies against authors publicly discussing research results before they are formally published. If a researcher has been found in violation of this policy, the journal may revoke acceptance of the paper. This policy is colloquially known as the Ingelfinger Rule. In another very early entry on Embargo Watch, Oransky quoted another reporter, Bob Finn, in defining the Ingelfinger Rule: Franz J. Ingelfinger, M.D., (1910-1980) was editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) from 1967-1977. During his tenure he decreed that for an article to be published in his journal it must not previously have appeared elsewhere. The rule prohibited authors from releasing their results to the news media before the date they were published in the journal. A small number of other journals (such as JAMA) developed similar policies, and the net result is that scientists are often afraid to talk to reporters for fear that they'll lose the opportunity to publish in JAMA or NEJM (or Nature or Cell or Science).In my experience, many planetary scientists live in fear of running afoul of the Ingelfinger Rule. As just one example, Carolyn Porco once asked me to take down all Cassini images from the Planetary Society website that I'd processed from the publicly released raw versions because, she said, any such images that appeared on planetary.org could not later be published in Science. As with Sicardy's concern, it turned out Porco's was unfounded. In fact, neither Science nor Nature -- the two most prestigious journals in which planetary science results are published -- actually threaten to revoke publication of anything based solely on its presentation at a scientific conference. Here is Science's policy: Scientists are welcome to present their results of their submitted or upcoming Science papers to colleagues at professional meetings and to share data with colleagues. Presentation at a meeting will in no way affect a decision on a manuscript. If the paper has been accepted for publication In Science, we ask that you inform the AAAS Office of Public Programs (202-326-6440) that you are planning to make such a presentation.And here is Nature's: Nature does not wish to hinder communication between scientists. For that reason, different embargo guidelines apply to work that has been discussed at a conference or displayed on a preprint server and picked up by the media as a result. (Neither conference presentations nor posting on recognized preprint servers constitute prior publication.)So Sicardy should have had no fear of letting people listen to, write about, and discuss his formal conference presentation. If there were any doubt about this, it should be cleared up by today's Embargo Watch post; Oransky contacted Nature about this specific presentation and was told "Yes, researchers with papers in submission at a Nature journal can certainly present at a scientific meeting but shouldn't court the press." If I had asked Sicardy any probing questions about his presentation, beyond clarification of facts he'd already presented, he shouldn't have answered them -- but I didn't, so it didn't come up. The funniest thing about this kerfuffle, as I just figured out today, was that all the time Sicardy's results about Eris' diameter and albedo were sitting out in public view in his two-page abstract submitted to the meeting. Until recently, the American Astronomical Society (the parent organization of the Division of Planetary Sciences) had a policy of its conference abstracts being "freely available but embargoed" which, as Oransky pointed out, is completely silly, because you can't enforce an embargo on people who have not agreed to honor it in the first place. Earlier this year, thanks to Oransky's prodding, the American Astronomical Society reversed their policy, stating that "When meeting abstracts are available publicly, either electronically or in print, they are not embargoed." So the embargo was doubly unnecessary! There's a lesson in here for wannabe investigative journalists: go read conference abstracts. They may contain all kinds of exciting secrets, just waiting to be uncovered! And to researchers who'd prefer to share their work with the public: if anybody asks about unpublished work that has a chance of making it into Science or Nature, just invite them to see what you have to say at a conference, or send them a helpful link to your conference abstracts, and don't fear Ingelfinger!
Post this page to:
CommentsThis comment form is powered by GentleSource Comment Script. It can be included in PHP or HTML files and allows visitors to leave comments on the website.
| ||||
When Eris comes closer to the Sun, there should be serious consideration to sending a flyby mission there. We've learned from 50 years of planetary exploration that we really have to go to these bodies to understand the intricacies of how they work.
That is what I presently do, having been the author of papers in these journals in the past. Nature and Science not only have these embargoes, which make it very difficult for the scientist to be certain about what they can be open and honest about when presenting results at a conference like DPS (we know there are reporters, bloggers, and tweeters in the room; we don't want breaking news mentioned in a conference presentation to preclude publication in these journals; we *do* still keep secrets, we *are* still keeping secrets, all to the detriment of scientific discourse).
Why do we publish in Science or Nature at all? The editors of these journals force authors to shorten and narrow the scope of their papers to the point that key information is left out (nowadays these two journals allow for "Supplementary Online Material" which very few people read, and, in my experience with Science, has a file size limitation which prevents full disclosure of the supporting material). This leaves it wide open for other scientists to say, "Gee, these guys are stupid, they didn't even consider Interpretation X," and then go on to get their own "publication" in Science or Nature by writing a letter describing their alternative ideas, ideas the authors were forced to delete if they wanted to move forward with publishing in these so-called prestigious journals. Further, having gone through all the trouble to shorten their paper, the journal then writes a 1-page news story, to be published in the same journal, about the research article... huh? So, they make the authors shorten their work by about 1 journal page so that one of the journal's science writers can write a 1-page "here is the spin our journal is putting on this story" piece.
So why do researchers bother with trying to publish in Science and Nature?
a) Because their institution (where they work) and their funding agency(ies) (e.g., NASA, NSF, etc.) expect the work to be published in the most prestigious journals. It makes them look good and gives them confidence that their resources aren't being wasted and that the researcher is deserving of tenure, further funding, etc. Nevermind that Science and Nature have these editing policies which alter and compromise the quality of the science reported in their papers.
b) Because the newsmedia rarely pay attention to a scientific result unless it is published in Science, Nature, or one of the couple of high profile medical journals. You publish your planetary science research in Icarus, JGR-Planets, or--- OMG, even worse--one of the new Open Access journals, it is not considered newsworthy. Now, why should the researcher care whether their work generates a news story? (1) the Institution and Funding Agencies, again, care, but (2) *most* importantly, if your research was paid for by Public Funds, then you have an obligation to ensure that the Public hears about what they got for their money. (Frankly, I prefer publication in Open Access journals for the same reason-- then *anyone* can read the paper, if they want, without having a subscription to the journal or sneaking around using other people's passwords or university access to the journals; some researchers would prefer to abandon the journals altogether...they argue, "why should we have to change our reporting of our results to make some editor and a couple of "peer reviewers" happy?" Peer review used to be about two things and only two things: to help the editor understand whether the report was up to the journal's standards and to help the authors shorten and tighten the paper because hardcopy journal space was limited... the former might still be true, the latter is ridiculous when most of this stuff is now published online).
Readers of Science and Nature, and readers of the press releases and articles generated by the publication of a paper in Science or Nature, should understand that these papers are not always as good as the reputation of the journal would have you believe. I have looked at the past 110+ years of papers published in Science in my field and most of those papers were and still are garbage. Most interesting is that the proportion of good stuff to lousy stuff is about the same 100 years ago as it is now, even though there is more data to work with. Science and Nature don't actually provide a magic stamp on your paper which says, "this is an example of really good and well-done science." Most of it, in my field (which is within planetary science) is really quite poor.
in short, working with embargoes is _the only way_ my non-English news media, which is also located in a time zone very different from the US, can report on world science both accurately and in a timely manner.
It's basically either Eurekalert, Nature press services, AAAS etc or having to start every day with 'cleaning up' after an average scientific day in America. We cannot yet afford to send someone to the East Coast, but, sadly, our competitors can - so not only does this 'cleaning up' eat away the time to report on local issues, but it also means admitting professional defeat on a daily basis.
my statements in Nantes.
I want to make clear that Nature was not the cause of those
statements. Leslie Sage was indeed explicit that Nature has no
embargo rules in this specific case (a scientific talk given to peers).
Now, and as some colleagues wanted to "tweet" all the results
in details and in real time, I wanted to avoid transforming my talk
into a press conference, which may have been in contradiction
with general embargo rules. So, I wanted was to make sure that
the exclusivity of the announcement remains clearly associated
with the publication in Nature, backed up by press releases from
ESO and Paris Observatory.
From a more general point of view, it is difficult for me to define
nowadays the dividing line between a scientific talk and a press
release. I think this confusion is shared by many colleagues I
talked with, as also pointed out in this page. This might actually
be a false problem, as long as all the parties agree.
Anyway, this discussion may help clarifying several issues, and
make authors more clear-minded when presenting their results.