In the last 2 weeks, 4 science magazines shut down, sold, or lost funding

On July 1, Research Professional News announced that it will be winding down operations after 30 years of reporting on science and research policy.

That news came right on the heels of a particularly tough week for science journalism. On June 22, conservation and ecology magazine bioGraphic shared that the struggling California Academy of Sciences was withdrawing its support; bioGraphic had to strike out on its own and is now searching for philanthropic donors. One day later, on June 23, Springer Nature announced that it was selling both Scientific American and Spektrum der Wissenschaft, a major German science magazine. 15 staffers at Scientific American were immediately laid off and those invited to stay under the new owners, LabX, were given offers with salary cuts of up to 30% — and, according to one staffer who spoke with me, no sick time or parental leave. This happened just days before the staff's votes to form a union were scheduled to be counted; the National Labor Relations Board went ahead with the vote anyways and staff voted 31:1 to unionize, according to a statement from the Writers Guild of America East.

RPN's owner, the statistics firm Clarivate (you might know them as the firm behind Web of Science), says the closure reflects the "longer-term realities" of "the challenges of sustaining a specialist journalism offering in today's environment" and a need to focus on their core offering of statistics and analytics. That language is familiar from Springer Nature's description of the sale of Scientific American and Spektrum der Wissenschaft as a business decision — a "strategic decision [that] will see Springer Nature focus on its core global publishing business."

Clarivate, however, got a bit more specific:

The challenges of sustaining a specialist journalism offering in today’s environment are significant, and the closure reflects those longer-term realities.

Springer Nature didn't mention anything like this in their announcement. But staff I spoke to at Scientific American told a similar story about what was happening there: the magazine wasn't profitable, one staffer told me, and attempts at fixing the problem with new strategies like focusing on quick-hit news weren't working well enough or fast enough for the magazine's owners.

Losing an important trade publication like RPN at a moment when the scientific landscape is more uncertain than ever on both sides of the Atlantic — and right as the UK discusses steep cuts to physics and astronomy — is a real loss. But it stings more coming just a week after the fates of three science magazines were thrown up in the air, including one of America's strongest legacy pop sci brands.

Unfortunately, this is nothing new. The media industry has either been in active collapse or steady decline for the last quarter-century, at least in the US.^[1] Science journalism, like all journalism, is changing and it's not yet clear what new models will succeed. One reason I decided to launch this newsletter was because I personally feel so uncertain about the future of magazines and wanted to experiment with something different.

I'm working on a longer piece about the sales of Scientific American and Spektrum der Wissenschaft, and what they could mean for the magazines' futures. Stay tuned. And if you're an insider with documents or other information you'd like to share, I'm grateful for tips: me@elisecutts.com or emc.7243623 on Signal.

[1]: My chart is a pretty direct reproduction of this one by Chris Mooney. I wanted to try downloading the data and reproducing it myself.

Minor Revisions

Follow-up on events from last week and other developing stories

Top 1%: Last week, I shared that the AI company q.e.d. had posted a ranking of the "top 1%" of bioarXiv preprints. Scientists continue to discuss the ranking on Bluesky, and a few have given q.e.d. more analytical treatments. Johnny Coates, an advocate for preprints, posted an essay exploring some of the problems with the top 1% and the questions it raises for the preprinting movement more broadly. Ryan Blekhman, a computational biologist who's done research on the preprint ecosystem, published a "peer review" of the 1% with an analysis showing the top preprints were dominated by authors at high-ranked institutions. Science satire newsletter In Preparation responded with a tongue-in-cheek "news" story about the Springer Nature CEO popping open a bottle of champagne to celebrate q.e.d.'s 1% as "open science self-cannibalization."

Not a bot: Last week's post also linked to a story in Science about the retraction of two of Max Planck's papers on copyright infringement grounds. That story suggested that the retractions may have been made by a bot. Springer Nature, the publisher that retracted the papers, has since weighed in with a clarification: comments to Ars Technica on July 2 confirm that human error was to blame, not a computer program.

Exeter humanities: Last week, the University of Exeter announced steep cuts to its respected humanities programs. Since then, a petition against the cuts gained more than 1,000 signatures, according to a Times of Higher Education story published June 30. Business leaders in the region published an open letter opposing the cuts on economic grounds (one argument: "we value these degrees — we employ these graduates") and calling for more transparency and consultation with businesses in the region.

Not milquetoast after all: I previously posted about what I thought was a pretty uninspiring editorial by Neil Shubin, the new head of the US National Academy of Sciences. Last week Nature published an extended interview with Shubin in which he was much more clear and forceful about the situation science is in right now.

Citation Needed

Last week in links, quotes, and commentary

Avi Loeb to head UFO council including billionaire de-extinction CEO and a sports psychologist

Everyone's favorite alien-hunting Harvard astrophysicist, Avi Loeb, is at it again. This time, he's leading a White House panel on UFOs. The billionaire CEO of Colossal Biosciences — the guys who gene-edited grey wolves and called them dire wolves last year — is listed on Loeb's post explaining his new role as the UFO team's expert for "oceanography and biology." Loeb's frequent collaborator on alien claims preprints, sports psychologist Omer Eldadi, is the team's expert for "data management, AI, and human psychology."

Consulting the Loeb Scale for Science PR Disasters, I'd rate this something like a 7.2. (And, if I can complain for a moment: it's hard to write satire in a world that insists upon one-upping any joke with something real that's even more absurd)

The Loeb Scale for science PR disasters

Science miscommunication is dangerous. But how dangerous?

Reviewer, too | Elise CuttsElise Cutts