Research Professional News to close after three decades
Clarivate will discontinue the research policy news service on 31 December 2026, ending a publishing lineage that began with Research Fortnight in 1994. The archive is to remain freely accessible.
Research Professional News will publish for the last time on 31 December 2026, Clarivate has announced, closing the UK research system's longest-standing dedicated news operation.
The announcement, made in a statement from senior vice president Emmanuel Thiveaud, said the closure reflects the challenges of sustaining a specialist journalism offering and a strategic focus on the company's core data, analytics and workflow products. Past content is to remain freely accessible, and the company says it is exploring options with third parties to host the archive.
The closure ends a lineage that began in 1994, when William Cullerne Bown founded Research Fortnight to report the mechanics of research funding that the general press ignored. The stable grew to include Research Europe, international editions, the Funding Insight service and the 8am Playbook briefing, alongside the funding-opportunities database that Clarivate continues to operate and market through Pivot-RP.
Tributes were led, on the day of the announcement, by the Science Media Centre – whose director published a piece in praise of Research Fortnight cataloguing the scrutiny role the titles played, and issuing what amounted to an open invitation to the sector to save something from the closure. The editorial masthead lists around seventeen specialist journalists, whose bylines will be sought after.
“What disappears is not the data but the scrutiny”
What disappears is not the data but the scrutiny: the daily accountability reporting on UKRI, the research councils, government departments and funders that no other newsroom covered with specialist depth. Sector figures spent the week of the announcement saying as much, publicly and warmly, about a publication many of them had argued with for years.
For readers, the practical notes are these: the archive remains freely accessible and worth bookmarking before organisational memory of what it contains fades; institutions holding bundled subscriptions should establish what their terms say about a service closing mid-term; and the 8am slot in several thousand research-professional mornings is, from January, unclaimed.
For subscribing institutions the practical questions are immediate. Research Professional subscriptions run on scattered annual cycles, and the news service now closes mid-term for many of them; the funding-opportunities database continues under Pivot-RP, but the renewals conversation this autumn becomes a decision about what, if anything, replaces the journalism. By one long-standing company claim, around 95 per cent of UK universities subscribed.
Interest declared: Research Agenda launches into the market Research Professional News leaves behind, and this publication would not exist in this form without the example – and now the absence – of its predecessor. The record, we think, has to continue. That is rather the point of us.