Editorial commentary
A request by a source that the information or news provided by that source not be published until a certain date or certain conditions have been met. In journalism and public relations, a news embargo or press embargo is often used by businesses making a product announcement, by medical journals, and by government officials announcing policy initiatives. The media is given advance knowledge of details being held secret so that reports can be prepared to coincide with the announcement date and yet still meet press time.
How press embargoes work in scholarly publishing
Journals commonly place an embargo on forthcoming articles they consider newsworthy: accredited journalists get early access — often via a service such as EurekAlert! or a publisher’s own press portal — on condition no story runs before an agreed release time, usually coinciding with official publication. This lets reporters read the full paper, contact the authors, and prepare a considered story rather than reacting to a bare release, while the journal controls when the finding becomes public.
Distinct from the Ingelfinger rule and a green-OA embargo
A press embargo is not the historically named “Ingelfinger rule” — a journal policy, associated originally with the New England Journal of Medicine, against publishing research already reported in the popular press or, in stricter forms, already posted as a preprint; that is a publication-eligibility policy, not a timed release arrangement. It is also distinct from a green open-access embargo, the period a publisher requires before a self-archived manuscript can be made openly available in a repository — a press embargo runs for days around publication, a green-OA embargo commonly for months.
Breaking an embargo
Reporting on embargoed material before the agreed release time — deliberately or by mistake — is treated seriously by journals and press offices; consequences range from a warning to an outlet losing early access to future embargoed material. Because preprints are, by definition, already public, posting a preprint of a paper a journal later wants to embargo can create tension with the journal’s own embargo policy, which authors are generally expected to check beforehand.
References
- Nature, Science, and EurekAlert! embargo-policy pages (illustrative of standard scholarly-publishing embargo practice).
Also known as
press embargo · news embargo · Media embargo
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="Press embargo"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/press-embargo" />{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/press-embargo",
"name": "Press embargo",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/press-embargo",
"description": "A request by a source that the information or news provided by that source not be published until a certain date or certain conditions have been met.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/compliance-regulatory#set",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/press-embargo",
"sameAs": [
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_embargo",
"press embargo",
"news embargo",
"Media embargo"
],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"publisher": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
},
"author": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#editorial-team"
},
"datePublished": "2026-05-19T19:13:02",
"dateModified": "2026-08-22T19:45:16",
"inLanguage": "en-GB",
"isAccessibleForFree": true
}
