Tom Sheldon, Senior Press Manager at the Science Media Centre, reflects on navigating the world of preprints and shares updates to guidance for members.
When preprints started to gain real traction in medical and life sciences about 10 years ago, there was a lot of talk about how great they would be for science but much less on they would impact press officers.
Our profession was facing a world where unverified, unedited research could be placed straight into the public domain on crucial subjects influencing people’s behaviour and beliefs. Preprints threatened to disrupt a system that has served us all well for decades, where – in general – embargoed research is presented to journalists when it’s peer-reviewed and published.
What would they do when so much early-stage research was suddenly freely available to them on servers such as medRxiv?
We consulted widely with journalists, journals and universities to gauge people’s views and preferences on what this new world would look like. Was the embargo dead? Would scientists start doing their own publicity by posting their preprints to social media? Would journalists start ignoring the journals and go straight to the servers instead? We had no idea.
But the overwhelming themes that came out of those conversations were:
- Most journalists still highly valued peer review and journal publication, most of them said they love embargoes, and they felt largely turned off by the ‘wild west’ of preprints – but if preprints were waved under their noses they’d feel forced to cover them
- Journals felt that publication remained the right time to seek publicity on new research, and many had concerns about whether future publicity would even be possible if the original preprint had been covered in the media
- Press officers generally wanted to hold off until publication, but worried about getting left behind if all the other universities started press releasing at preprint stage
So back in 2019, Stempra released its first version of guidance for press officers on preprints. It aimed to provide junior staff with sure-footed advice and more senior comms professionals with a clear sense of what journalists want, what’s the norm in other institutions, and a checklist of things to think through when faced with a preprint. Feedback on that edition suggested it was well received.
Since then, preprints have become part of the landscape and have even been adopted by many of the major journals in their submission processes. But the publication-and-embargo system has endured; and it’s become even more clear since the first edition that the credit for that lies squarely with the press officers who have held the line and who agree – almost universally – that press releasing a preprint should be the exception, not the rule.
The last decade has demonstrated that the system still works for journalists, and further consultation this year with journal and university press officers has shown that people still prefer to operate in a system of embargoes and peer review.
2026 felt like the right time to update the document, and I’m very pleased to say that with the expert help of Beth Baker (PLOS) and Craig Brierley (Cambridge) we have an updated and more detailed ‘checklist for press officers on preprints’. We hope you find it useful.