Publicity without scrutiny: journals’ media embargoes under fire | Times Higher Education (THE)

"The issuing of press releases about academic research that is not openly available impedes fact-checking and public debate, it has been warned.

MPs on the UK’s science and technology committee said that they took a “dim view” of the issuing of press releases without allowing access to the full peer-reviewed reports, having heard evidence that publishers were using embargoes as “news management” tools in such cases....In its evidence, Imperial College London says that some of the drawbacks of the embargo system “could be addressed if press releases and the journal papers on which they are based were required to be publicly available and linked from online news reports as part of the embargo contract”.

Felicity Mellor, senior lecturer in science communication at Imperial, told Times Higher Education that journals should make research papers available to journalists, “regardless of whether they’re open access”...."