The staff break rooms within federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health may soon get a lot less interesting. According to a report from Axios, the Trump administration has canceled funding and contracts to Springer Nature, including payments for subscriptions to the company’s publications, which include the magazine Scientific American and prominent peer-reviewed research journals under the Nature portfolio.
Per Axios, the total contract cuts amount to millions worth of funding for Springer Nature. According to data compiled via USA Spending, the open data source of federal spending information, Springer Nature currently has 19 active contracts with federal agencies, including a $5.2 million contract to provide subscriptions to the company’s portfolios of journals.
“We are proud of our track record in communicating U.S. research to the rest of the world for over a century and continue to have good relationships with U.S. federal agencies,” a spokesperson for Springer Nature told Gizmodo. “We don’t comment on individual contracts, but across our global business there is no material change to our customers or their spend. We remain confident about the strength of the service we provide.”
Trump’s attack on Springer shouldn’t come as too much of a shock. Earlier this year, the Department of Justice sent letters to medical journals for being “partisan” in the eyes of the administration, in part for promoting “woke” science, like saying climate change is real or that trans people exist. Prior reports indicated that CHEST, a peer-reviewed publication on pulmonary care published by the American College of Chest Physicians, as well as several other publications, received threatening letters accusing them of publishing work influenced by “advertisement (under postal code) or sponsorship (under relevant fraud regulations).”
Springer received a letter as well, per Axios. In addition to questioning the editorial practices of the publisher, it also alleged that Springer had ties to China and was censoring information at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party. Around the same time, Donald Trump Jr. called for the Department of Government Efficiency to end contracts with Springer Nature because it “pushed gender insanity.”
Attacking Springer for publishing legitimate research that doesn’t match the preferred positions of the administration is a pretty terrible reason to cut off access to the information provided by the company’s wealth of journals. But Springer is not without its issues. In 2017, the company was accused of restricting access to some research in China, and has issued tons of retractions of research in recent years due to issues with its peer-review process.
For what it’s worth, most of those threatening letters from the DOJ were signed by then US Attorney Ed Martin, who also threatened to investigate people who criticized Elon Musk and threatened to pull Wikipedia’s nonprofit status. Martin resigned from that role last month (and handed over the reins to Fox News host Jeanine Pirro of all people). Not much has come from those threats thus far, though they undoubtedly have a chilling effect on the publishers that received them, as any legal challenge from the government would surely be drawn out and expensive.
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