The case of the missing Editorial Blog Post (and journal team)

Here’s a wee puzzle: A mature Open Data focused journal (“Journal A”), owned and launched by an company or Institute (“Institute B”), developed into the flagship of an Academic Publisher (“Publisher C”), runs their own properly archived and citable blog with DOIs etc (“Blog D”). If a briefly published editorial Blog Post (“Editorial E”) disappears from their Blog, could it be an accident, or something else?

An accidental deletion of a blog post by a publisher suggests might be taken as incompetence, but if the post isn’t returned it starts to look deliberate to me. Normally I would have expected a formal retraction, but this feels like self-censorship in an effort to control public perception? Neither is a good look for a custodian of the Scientific Record.

Can you tell what I’m talking about yet? What if I hint the missing “Editorial E” blog post was by the out-going Editor In Chief of “Journal A”, celebrating many years of innovation, and noting the decision of “Institute B” to terminate the jobs of a large part of the team at “Publisher C”, and that this post on “Blog D” is/was the only announcement of those changes? Answer below…