Over the last few months, an academic storm has been brewing over! The European Science Foundation has been working on their new initiative – a European Reference Index for the Humanities. In other words, their goal is to rate every journal in every subject as either A, B, or C. Essentially, in British vocab, they are creating a league table with three divisions … and, as one can imagine, that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. To that point, more than 50 journals in the history of science, technnology, and medicine from around the world have requested to be removed from the list. They are all publishing a joint editorial highlighting the issues that these leaders in the field have with this process .. which are many and very valid! I completely agree with all of the points raised in the editorial. The whole process has been a travesty and I hope that the pressure brought to bear will be successful by either having the journals removed from the listing or, more dramatically, having the whole process scraped!

If you have any opinions of your own, feel free to speak your mind below or on the Royal Society’s website.