In the last 2 weeks, 4 science magazines shut down, sold, or lost funding
Also: Avi Loeb to head White House UFO committee, overworked ERC peer reviewers, Anthropic's push for AI in science, and more from last week
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, just 5 sick or personal days and no paid parental leave.[1] 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.
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