And when they are gone, they are gone for good. There is no way to unwind that spring. To unsee what has been seen. To unfeel what has been felt.

Call me Ishmael.

Thus, scientific journalism has devised a way to make information from meetings more readily available: the publication of abstracts and proceedings that are not peer-reviewed, an intermediate step between the transientness of newspaper reports and the permanence of the peer-reviewed paper.

Sociologists would like to study how this phenomenon came into being.