Embargoed Science

The popular notion of a lone scientist privately toiling long hours in a laboratory, striking upon a great discovery, & announcing it to the world is a romanticized fiction. This book reveals the true process behind science news--an elite few scholarly journals control press coverage through a mechanism known as an embargo. The journals distribute advanc ecopies of their articles to hundreds & sometimes thousands of journalists around the world, on the condition that journalists agree not to report their stories until a common time, several days later. When the embargo lifts, airwaves & newspaper pages are flooded with stories based on the latest issue.