Paris (AFP)
Nearly 200 scientists, including Nobel Prize winners, have signed a petition to support the monthly "La Recherche" at the request of its editorial team, which opposes a merger project with the magazine "Sciences et Avenir".
The two titles belong to Claude Perdriel (also owner of Challenges or the magazines L'Histoire and Historia) who wishes to merge them to create "le grand journal des sciences français", a project presented at the end of April in CSE, according to the editorial staff.
"The project provides for the creation of a single scientific monthly, called Sciences et Avenir - La Recherche, the merger of the two websites, as well as the publication of a quarterly La Recherche - Les Essentiels du XXIe siècle", specifies the petition put online at Change.org.
"Certainly, the Perdriel group as a whole is currently experiencing difficulties, but it seems to us, particularly in the current period, that the scientific field should not be used as an adjustment variable. Besides its improbable title, the creation of this hybrid newspaper would blur two very different identities ", deplores the text signed by the society of editors (SDR) of" La Recherche ".
"Let us not be fooled, in mergers, it is always the biggest that wins. This dissolution therefore appears to us as the shortest path to the disappearance, in the long term, of the magazine La Recherche", alerts the editorial staff.
Among the signatories, big names in scientific research like the astrophysicist Michel Mayor, Nobel Prize in physics 2019, the physicist Serge Haroche, Nobel Prize in physics 2012 or the epidemiologist Dominique Costagliola, director of research at Inserm.
Put on line Saturday, the petition had collected more than 800 signatures Sunday.
"La Recherche", which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, is aimed at a science-aware readership wishing to discover a field in depth, while "Sciences and the Future" targets a wider audience, with a predominance of subjects health, reminds the editors.
Claude Perdriel, 93, sold another of his publications, Le Nouveau Magazine Littéraire, to his rival Lire last week despite opposition from his journalists and supporters of the monthly magazine in the world of culture.
A merger between the two titles is now planned.
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