Science Freelance Market Guide
Created January 10, 2022; checked for accuracy November 22, 2022.
Fees: This publisher of science research and news pays a minimum of $0.75 a word for online stories, going up to a $1 a word or more for its regular writers. Fees for print stories start at $1.25 per word. Writers are paid for the length of the final product. Science commissions online stories as short as 250 to 400 words for news briefs and up to 1,200 to 1,500 words for features. In print, a news story is typically about 600 to 800 words, and features can be several thousand words. Science pays a flat fee of $500 for a Q&A.
Submit to: For a news story based on embargoed research, contact Online News Editor David Grimm, dgrimm@aaas.org. For other breaking news, ranging from policy news to issues important to the scientific community, write to insider@aaas.org. For feature stories, send your pitch to science_news@aaas.org where it will be matched to the appropriate editor. Pitches about biomedicine can be sent directly to Managing News Editor John Travis, jtravis@aaas.org.
Website: www.science.org
Owner: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest multidisciplinary scientific society and a leading publisher of research through its Science family of journals.
Readership demographics: The core audience for the print magazine is working scientists across a board variety of disciplines and policy makers. “We have a tricky audience to navigate,” Travis said. “We have to write our biology stories for astronomers and our quantum physics stories for biologists.” In addition, the print magazine material also appears online, and the digital audience is broader and includes anyone in the public interested in science. “We hope that any story can be read by most anyone,” Travis said.
Frequency of publication: The print magazine is published weekly. The website is updated daily. About half of online-only stories and a quarter of print stories are either assigned to regular freelancers or are pitched by freelancers.
What they look for in a pitch: Freelancers new to Science should include links to three or four clips. Always put “Pitch” in the subject line of the email so that it doesn’t get flagged as spam or ignored as a press release.
Research news: “Because we receive all the big press releases and embargoed information from major journals (Science, Nature, PNAS, etc.), you will have very little luck successfully pitching a study from these. Our biggest piece of advice for selling us on a straight research story is this: Pitch us hidden gems,” according to the Science pitching guide. Write a few sentences describing the study and why it is important. Include a press release and the paper, if possible.
Features: “We’re looking for outside-the-ordinary stories that are not being covered by everyone,” Travis said. Narrative features are becoming more common in Science, but the stories are told less from a patient perspective and more from a scientist perspective. When pitching a feature, give a sense of how you will tell the story. “What is its scope, will it focus on certain characters or places, what is the storyline? But keep the pitch tight, three or four paragraphs at most,” according to the guide.
Most common mistake editors see with pitches: “Probably the most common mistake is not looking at our archive and knowing what we’ve already done on the topic,” said Travis.
Lead time for pitching: “If you come across news, don’t wait to pitch it. We want to publish as soon as possible after the event. For embargoed studies, please pitch us at least three days in advance, so that we can OK the proposal and you can deliver a story a day or two before the embargo lifts,” according to the pitching guide. Travis said features can take three to four months and sometimes longer to get published once the pitch is accepted.
Best place for a freelancer to break in: Travis said freelancers new to Science might want to start out pitching breaking policy news or news stories based on a single research study. “It’s pretty tough to get a feature with us if you haven’t written for us at all,” he said.