A new beginning

The publisher of Research Professional News has announced it is to close the service on 31 December. This leaves a huge hole in both Britain and the EU. As Hetan Shah, the chief executive of the British Academy, said, "We will be less intelligent without it.”

As the person who founded Research Professional, and its printed forerunners Research Fortnight and Research Europe, I know the shape of this hole very well. The point of this page is to announce the launch of a new, independent publication from me that, from 1 January, will fill it. 

To stay in touch with the plans as they develop over the coming months, click the button. To find out more about how I see the hole and how I intend to fill it, read on.

The shape of the hole

When I started Research Fortnight, research was badly underserved by the media. I was working on New Scientist and could smuggle maybe 300 words once a fortnight in past a very reluctant news editor. And yet, those brief articles, if you put them together, did a better job of covering Britain’s research enterprise than everything else. This made it easy for people to recognise the potential value of Research Fortnight. David Phillips, the chairman of the Advisory Board for the Research Councils (the forerunner of UKRI), let us put his name on the invite to the launch party. D.E.N. Davies, the Chief Scientific Adviser at the MoD, gave us our first scoop. Bill Stewart, the Prime Minister’s Chief Scientific Adviser, bought the first subscription. Most importantly for the bank lending me the startup money under the Small Firms Loan Guarantee Scheme, David Thomas, who ran the innovation office at Imperial, wrote me a cheque for £5000 for 70 copies that he could distribute around the departments.

Today, once you take out Research Professional News, the hole is bigger than it was in 1994. On the one hand, the media landscape is worse than it was then. Research is still a dead zone but the neighbouring publications are weaker than they were – serious journalism everywhere is in retreat as social media and search devours advertising budgets and publishers decide that the courageous pursuit of truth is not profitable. This is specially visible in science journalism where Scientific American and three other publications have found themselves in turmoil in recent weeks, the science correspondents at national newspapers are being laid off, and even the biggest publishers are insisting on pre-reviewing articles about authoritarian states. On the other hand, the need is bigger. Research remains not merely a core function but central to our idea of a university and has gone from being unmanaged to managed. For example, in the UK back in 1994 RAGnet had fewer than 100 members; today its successor, the Association of Research Managers and Administrators, is pushing 4,000. 

The reaction

The people who know all this best of course are the readers of Research Professional News, as reflected in the reaction to the announcement of its closure. These include:

Adam Tickell, Birmingham VC: “I’ve just seen the terrible news that Research Professional News will close at the end of the year.  RP provides unparalleled insight into higher education and research policy in the UK and has an outstanding team of journalists and commentators.”

Hetan Shah, British Academy: “I’m really sorry to hear this news. The Research Professional team are excellent and have helped the HE and research sector keep up with what is happening. We will be less intelligent without it.”

Martin Smith, Wellcome Trust: “Really sad news – thank you for everything you’ve done – not least in holding government to account on things that would otherwise slip below the radar. You’ve been doing important work that will be missed.”

Three longer articles have been written about the closure by Adam Golberg (Nottingham), Fiona Fox (Science Media Centre) and Andy Hawkes (CASE) and there are two threads of comments on LinkedIn replying to Ehsan Masood and Chris Parr. There have also been many heartfelt private messages from people whose job doesn't include speaking in public about this kind of thing.

I'd prefer this hole didn't exist and have stayed out of this space for a decade since I sold up in order to give Research Professional a free run. But, given all this, the decision to start this new publication has been one of the easiest commercial calls I’ve ever made.

The new publication

It feels slightly ridiculous to set out in any detail the coverage you can expect from the new publication for three reasons. First, Research Professional News today is much as I left it 10 years ago. Some of the senior people are people I hired and, as an institution, it has stayed true to the principles I cultivated over the preceding 22 years. These decades of work are a better guide than anything I could scribble here. Second, a break like this is a moment for reflection and re-thinking and that work is only just beginning. Technology has moved on and so has the world we will be writing about, not least in the priority now given to industrial strategy. Third, I need to talk to you, our potential subscribers. 

Still, some general contours can be set out. The new publication will cover the UK and Europe and potentially other parts of the world. It will be sold to institutions as a site licence with the price varying according to your research income. It will be a modern news service doing news the old-fashioned way – so it will be staffed by experienced and expert journalists and I expect the email bulletins to become the first thing many people read every day. 

The editorial mission has four dimensions.

The first is to provide subscribers with timely, actionable intelligence, be that through news, analysis or commentary. This need-to-know material will help everyone working in research to navigate that world effectively. The environment is changing all the time – as those in the UK have just been reminded by the demise of DSIT – and the goal is to help readers to understand and anticipate what is coming down the track, including the plans of funders. 

The second is to provide a forum for discussion of the challenges and options that face us – to help shape the environment. The point is not to impose any particular point of view but to encourage debate to flow freely. There will be an Editorial Advisory Board.

The third arises from the fact that research shades into many other activities. To mention just a few, it is integral to science, scholarship, engineering, R&D, technology development, medicine, innovation, higher education, industrial strategy, regional development and venture capital. English lacks a good word for all this – the German Wissenschaft gets at it better – but if you were to draw it all as a Venn diagram you’d have a daisy of conceptual petals with research as the electric yellow centre where they all overlap. Thus another part of the job is to help these pieces integrate more effectively: when I started Research Fortnight, the first editorial said the goal was to bring universities, government and capital together. 

The fourth is to bring a degree of scrutiny and criticality to the world we are writing about. This isn’t always comfortable for those running the show but David Phillips, for example, lent me his support when launching Research Fortnight despite a furious row we’d had over the cancellation of the Nuclear Structure Facility at Daresbury.

Such enlightened self-interest from those at the top was not replicated when we launched Research Europe in Brussels. DG XII, as DG Research and Innovation was then known, was at the time labouring under the financially dubious leadership of Edith Cresson. It reacted by holding a meeting to discuss ways of shutting us down; at our launch party in Brussels, her deputy DG loudly attacked me for noting on the first front page that the Court of Auditors would not sign off the DG’s accounts. It took more than a decade for the good guys to take over and get the accounts signed off – and meanwhile Cresson was convicted by the European Court of Justice for offences concerning the appointment of her dentist to oversee the Commission’s HIV research programme.

Research Europe could not be shut down because, unlike so much of the media that reports on Brussels, we were not funded by the Commission. Our money came from subscribers and it is this diversity that provides the platform for robust and independent journalism. It allows us to be what Hugo Young once called something in between a friendly critic and a critical friend.

Going forwards

When I created Research Fortnight, I did it all by myself from my kitchen table. These days I prefer co-creation, so please feel free to get in touch:

      • Subscribers and readers – to say what you do or don’t want
      • Journalists – to say if you’re interested in a job
      • Contributors – to say you’d like to write for us
      • Advertisers – to talk about audience and rates
      • Donors – if you'd be interested in co-funding an investigations team.

You can comment on this article (once you have registered with the button below) or email me at william@cullernebown.uk.

The offering will be firmed up in the coming weeks and by the end of September I expect to be starting to invite subscriptions to start in January. I will keep you posted on progress. In the meantime, please let your corner of the world know what's coming down the track...

25 July 2026