Abstract
This year, 2022, the Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights is celebrating its 40th anniversary. In this editorial, we will go into that celebratory milestone as well as announce a new editor-in-chief for our Quarterly and inform our readers about our exciting pilot to go open access.
40 Years
In 1981, the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM) was founded as a centre to further research and teaching about human rights in the Netherlands and beyond. A year later, in 1982, SIM started publishing a newsletter which soon was re-baptised the Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights. Quickly evolving from an overview of the work of the institute into a full-fledged academic journal, the Quarterly, or NQHR as it became known, has grown into one of the world's leading human rights journals. Over the years it has taken many shapes and forms, both in its appearance and contents, adapting like a chameleon to the changing landscape of academia. From self-publishing to long and good cooperation – first with our publisher Intersentia and, since 2017, with the esteemed international publishing house SAGE – the journal has continued to grow and reach larger audiences. We have evolved from providing regional and global human rights updates and book reviews to our current shape of a strong focus on publishing academic articles. Through our quite unique triple-anonymized peer review system and rigorous quality checks, we have been able to not only publish work from the ‘big names’ in the field but also from countless up-and-coming academics, many of whom have gone on to become established experts themselves. To mark our 40th anniversary by way of public service to the broader academic community, we organised, early in 2022, an online workshop for early-career researchers about how peer reviewers assess articles, which attracted a large and engaged audience. We also gathered a special online meeting of our international board, which reflected the committed community around the journal.
Transfer of Editor-in-Chief
The 40th anniversary of our journal is also an appropriate time for me, Antoine Buyse, to step down as editor-in-chief and hand over the baton to a direct colleague. I will remain on the journal's executive board. After succeeding the late professor Fried van Hoof almost a decade ago, standing at the helm of this journal has not just been a great privilege and honour – as is almost a cliché to say, yet still deeply felt – but also both a challenging (think editorial diplomacy with authors and reviewers) and very joyful experience (think reading great new articles and the solid cooperation within our board).
It is wonderful to see that the small sapling that the NQHR once was has grown into a solid tree, deeply rooted in the expertise and work of our international board and countless other peer reviewers, with our very dedicated executive board, from all regions of the world, and our publisher as its tree trunk, and our countless authors and their fresh ideas put down in articles as the branches and leaves. Together, they form the tree from which our global readership can harvest the fruit.
As an editor-in-chief, I am grateful for the cooperation with all of you, from board members to readers, and especially to those colleagues from academic institutions within the Netherlands, who have formed over the years the executive board of the Quarterly – the truly collegial atmosphere, dedication, good humour, expertise and wisdom you all carry with you is a joy to work with. And last but certainly not least, an editor-in-chief would be nothing without the work of those who are the very pillars of any academic journal: its managing editors. I have had the pleasure to work with no less than six: Laura Henderson, Julie Fraser, Erin Jackson, Leonie Huijbers, Elif Erken, and currently Elmin Omičević. Thank you so much, to all of you for the smooth cooperation over the years!
I am confident that the journal is in very good hands, passing on the torch to my successor, Dr. Katharine Fortin. Also being based here at SIM, at Utrecht University, and with her experience on our board in the past years, her academic expertise and her dedication to open science, I am more than confident that the journal will continue to flourish!
Going Open Access
Finally, let us take the opportunity to announce an exciting new step in the existence of the NQHR: we are going open access as of 1 January 2023! We are pleased to announce with our publisher, SAGE, the news that the Quarterly will be participating in a Subscribe to Open (S2O) pilot from 2023 (Volume 41) onwards.
Subscribe to Open (S2O) is a subscription model that allows a publisher to convert journals from gated subscription access to Open Access (OA), available to everyone, one year at a time. Institutional subscription revenue is collected as normal and, assuming all subscribers participate, the publisher commits to publishing that year's content OA. The offer is repeated every year, with the opening of each year's content contingent on continued sufficient participation.
The NQHR is one of two law titles in the pilot with SAGE which will be reviewed annually and, it is hoped, will be expanded, if successful, in the future. As a consequence of more and more transformative ‘Read and Publish’ agreements by many of the largest European library consortia in their negotiations with publishers, including with our publisher SAGE, the NQHR has already significantly increased the amount of content being published open access. This will continue for so long as those agreements, and others like them, remain in place.
What the S2O pilot initiative will facilitate, however, is a fuller transition to OA under which all content published in NQHR will be published OA. This makes the S2O model much more equitable because, at no additional cost, all publishing and reading becomes freely available to everyone, anywhere in the world. This will mean that Volume 41 will be published completely open.
As part of this, SAGE will be newly making available the exclusive access to the complete NQHR archive to all subscribers. For many subscribers, this will enable access to an additional decade of content back to the start of the NQHR in 1990.
We are delighted to be participating in the S2O pilot with SAGE and look forward to continuing to report on progress as the pilot moves forward!
Antoine Buyse, Editor-in-Chief
Elmin Omičević, Managing Editor