How ECNP develops press releases for the congress

Thanks for taking an interest in the press work at ECNP. This page tells you a little about what you might expect.

We aim for a general media audience, and we’ve had good success in publicising work from the conference. Here are a couple of examples of stories from recent ECNP congresses:

• Taking a break from the news can improve mental health, study finds (News)
• Disturbed sleep patterns may be key to ADHD, study finds (The Guardian)
• Opioids May Interfere With Parenting Instincts, Study Finds (New York Times)

You can see recent press releases from the ECNP here.

What do we do?
The work needs to be new, of good quality, and newsworthy. There is a lot of work presented at ECNP, so I need to ask for feedback from a lot of people, and then make a selection. I make the selection by asking a series of standard, general questions, and then discussing this with the ECNP review team. In the end, we hope to develop the material into a press release, which I will then send out to journalists.

In general, the work needs to be new. If something is already in the public domain (for example, if it has recently been published), then it also needs to be treated differently, so please let me know. If anything changes (for example if a paper is accepted or rejected, etc.), then you should let me know.

If we go ahead in developing a press release, we will probably go through several versions before we arrive at one that we are all happy with: you, me, and the ECNP reviewers need to be happy with the final version – otherwise we will not send it to the press. So we can’t be 100% sure of going ahead until the final version is approved by all.

Publication
Some journals (for example, Science) don’t like work to appear in the press before publication. But in fact most journals don’t really mind (for example JAMA, European Neuropsychopharmacology, etc.). So this means that we need to be aware of the issue, and we may need to discuss it. Some of the most successful stories come when we are able to combine a peer-reviewed publication with a presentation at ECNP: in these cases, we work closely with the journal. So it’s worth discussing any publication plans.

It’s not compulsory to work with the press, but it can be great fun, and really quite valuable to get good science into the media.

Ask me if there’s anything you are not sure about.

Tom Parkhill
press@ecnp.eu