Loss of editorial independence at C&ENews is tragic

Grateful that we're not in any danger at Science

As a graduate student, postdoc, and young faculty member, I had print subscriptions to Science and Chemical and Engineering News (there were no online versions). Thankfully, both the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the American Chemical Society (ACS) had progressive policies that allowed me to get subscriptions at a deep discount. These two publications completely shaped who I am as a scientist - and now a science editor and columnist.

Most of the stories that I remember from those days weren’t so great for science. It was the era of the blockbuster scientific misconduct cases of David Baltimore and John Dingell in Science, and Ron Breslow in C&ENews. (Little did I know I would go on to spend so much time on such matters.). But the journalists at both places were unimpeded in covering these important stories. The folklore at Science is that my predecessor at the time, Dan Koshland, was obsessed with the Baltimore matter.

Scientific societies that publish news for their members must grant editorial independence to their magazines. Science and C&ENews should not be corporate brochures for their societies. In Science, we do have a very clearly marked section called “Association Affairs” or sometimes “News and Notes” that infrequently appears on the web site and in the print magazine. No one looking at these would be mistaken that this is editorial content of the magazine, and we have no role in its preparation. Likewise, the rest of Science is firmly under editorial control. I have never been directed to take or not take a paper or commentary piece (including Letters) by my boss, Sudip Parikh, who is the CEO of AAAS. Further, I have never been directed to steer or spike a news story, and our news department enjoys another level of independence from research, which is important generally for their journalism, but also because sometimes they write important news stories that are critical of papers and authors in Science.

In the last few days, the ACS has gone a different route. I have been hearing that they have been interfering in C&ENews for the last year or so, but they confirmed it all this week by abruptly firing the highly respected editor-in-chief, Bibiana Campos Seijo, and one of their best journalists, Jyllian Kemlsey. Both of these folks are highly respected in our world.

Members of the advisory board for C&ENews have posted an important letter calling out the ACS for their actions. In a message to the board, ACS even said the quiet part out loud: they are repositioning C&ENews as an official organ of the American Chemical Society. They had no choice but to disclose this because Chemical Abstracts and the ACS journals are sufficiently profitable that they could certainly choose to continue to subsidize C&ENews if they wished. These developments are tragic for the future of chemistry, and further, if they really do this, they should at least change the name to ACSNews. Leaving it as it is but having it read as a corporate brochure of the ACS is misleading at best. It is no longer the C&ENews that we all have relied on.

I and my predecessors and colleagues have always been grateful for our independence, but we are even more so now. I am posting this on my Substack because this is my personal opinion, and it would not be appropriate to run it in the journal - even though it is very complimentary of my boss and the board of the AAAS. But Science is not an official organ of the AAAS.

And it never will be.