Washington

What's New, a popular and often scurrilous weekly news summary read by more than 10,000 physicists and followers of science policy in the United States and abroad, could cease publication in July, following the American Physical Society's (APS) threat to stop supporting its author, Bob Park.

The APS wrote last month to the physics department at the University of Maryland at College Park, where Park is a professor, saying that it wants to cut its support from two-thirds to one-half of his salary.

If that happens, says Park, he will have to increase his teaching and other commitments at the university, and will be unable to continue his work for the APS, which includes the production of What's New. Given the lack of effort involved, he describes the APS letter as “an adiabatic firing”.

Park has served as a kind of freelance mouthpiece for the APS for many years. He writes frequent columns for The New York Times and other newspapers on everything from global warming to the recent spying scandal at nuclear weapons laboratories.

Neither the columns nor the What's New electronic newsletter are attributed directly to the APS — the newsletter always ends with Park's signature line: “Opinions are the author's and are not necessarily shared by the APS, but they should be.”" But they do reflect the views of many physicists, and give the community a rapid response to current events — lacking in most scientific societies, which can take months to agree a point of view.

As news of the APS plan leaked out during the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington last week, some physicists were planning to write to the new APS president, Jim Langer, of the University of California at Santa Barbara, to protest at the decision. Some suggest that Park may have offended someone once too often.

Jerome Friedman of the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, last year's APS president, said that he didn't want to discuss the matter “until it was resolved”. But he added: “There is no dissatisfaction with Bob — it's a question of resources.”