Argonne National Laboratory Shuts Down Online Ask a Scientist Program

itamblyn writes In a surprising decision, Argonne National Laboratory has decided to pull the plug on its long-standing NEWTON Ask A Scientist Program. NEWTON is (soon to be was) an on online repository of science questions submitted by school children from around the world. A volunteer group of scientists contributed grade-level appropriate answers to these questions. For the past 25 years, a wide range of topics ranging have been covered, including the classic "why is the sky blue" to "is there way to break down the components of plastics completely into their original form". Over the years, over 20,000 questions have been answered. According to ANL, the website will be shut down permanently on 1 March. There is no plan to make the content available in an alternate form or to hand over stewardship to another organization. When contacted about transferring the repository to another institution or moving to a donation model, the response from ANL was simply: "Thank you again for all your support for Newton. Unfortunately, moving Newton to another organization is not a possibility at this time. Thank you again for your energy and support."

Comments

Politics?

[milgram]

In my experience, events like this point to some petty internal political battle. It was great for people using it, and I assume there was minimal overhead to running the program, so "stupidity and greed" seem like the most likely course. Unfortunate. Maybe some bureaucrat had a KPI to reduce external facing servers software cost...

Re:Politics?

[ShanghaiBill]

In my experience, events like this point to some petty internal political battle.

Another possibility is that this is the Washington Monument Syndrome. This happens when an agency's budget is reduced, and rather than cutting the least important program, they cut the most visible program, in an attempt to get their funding restored.

Re:Budget Cuts

[TooMuchToDo]

Please don't. I'm already archiving the entire site into archive.org right now, and don't want their load to increase to the point they were try to prevent the archiving operation.

Re: Cost savings

[NoMaster]

Simple web app: $1000
Shared web hosting: $50/yr
Managing a pool of postgrads, postdocs, researchers, and other subject matter experts to answer children's questions while fending off the Creationists, Tea-Partiers, and other assorted nutjobs who insist on being given equal access and status to teach the Truth to counter the Liberal Ivory-Tower Acedemic lies? Priceless...