The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) wants to start an in-depth study of the editorial policies of the most famous scientific journals, such as Science, Nature, Cell, The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Brain. NWO president Jos Engelen announced this in a lecture on open access publishing on 11 December in Nijmegen. The lecture was given in the framework of the Honors Program of Radboud University on “Ethos in Science”.
According to Engelen, it is urgent to assess the role of these journals in the communication of scientific knowledge. Engelen wants the scientific system to shift to free dissemination of all scientific results. He sees three reasons for this. First, it is “a moral obligation to grant members of the public free access to scientific results that were obtained through public funding, through taxpayers’ money.” Engelen gets “particularly irritated when I read in my newspaper that new scientific results have been published on, say, sea level rise, to find out that I have to buy the latest issue of Nature Magazine to be properly informed.” Second, scientific knowledge gives a competitive edge to the knowledge economy and should therefore freely flow into society and the private sector. Third, science itself will profit from the free flow of knowledge between fields. “In order to face the ‘grand challenges’ of today scientific disciplines have to cooperate and new disciplines will emerge.”
Engelen wants to investigate the editorial policies of the most famous scientific journals because they stand in the way of open access. These feel no reason to shift their business model to open access, because their position is practically impregnable”. Engelen takes the journal Science, published by the Association for the Advancement of Science as example. “Its reputation is based on an extremely selective publishing policy and its reputation has turned ‘Science’ into a brand that sells”. Engelen remarks that the same is true for Nature, Cell and other journals published by commercial publishers. “Scientific publications are only a part, not even the dominant part of ‘the business’, but the reputation of the journal is entirely based on innovative science emanating from publicly funded research. Conversely, the reputation of scientists is greatly boosted by publications in these top-journals; top-journals with primarily an interest in selling and not in, for example, promoting the best researchers.”
Engelen concludes this part of his lecture on open access with a clear shot across the bow. “It has puzzled me for a while already that national funding organisations are not more critical about the authority that is almost automatically imputed to the (in some cases full time, professional, paid) editors of the top-journals. I think an in depth, objective study of the editorial policies, and the results thereof, commissioned by research funders, is highly desirable and in fact overdue. I intend to take initiatives along this line soon!”
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