Scientists Are Subverting Formal Publishing. Well, Some of Them

Every week science journalists get a bunch of emails from various Respectable Scientific Journals telling us, in advance, what articles those journals are going to publish. When I started in this game, these tables of contents came by fax; today, in the future, they're downloadable PDFs. The quo for all this quid is that we agree not to publish anything until a set time and day. It's called an embargo, and it is in some senses the anticlimax of a long story--the story of a scientific discovery. Sure, journalists might focus on the eureka moment or the fascinating details of the methods some scientist used.