Closing out twenty-twenty on a positive note

As we come to the end of a tumultuous 2020, it is a pleasure to be able end on an upbeat note and report some of the positive things that have happened this year for the Journal of Responsible Innovation.

Among the more noteworthy developments in 2020 are the following:

• JRI received its first impact factor.

• The impact factor is a respectable 3.059 ¹

• JRI is strongly positioned in four academic subject category rankings.

• JRI will be converting to a fully open access (OA) title beginning in 2021.

As I reported at the beginning of the year, JRI was expected to receive its first impact factor this, its seventh, year. I am confident that I speak for the entire editorial board when I say that we could not be happier with the result.

Similarly, the following subject category rankings attest to the scholarly reach, quality, and interdisciplinary breadth of the authors who publish in this journal:

History & Philosophy of Science: ranked 2/48 (1^st quartile)

Ethics: ranked 3/55 (1^st quartile)

Social Issues: 4/44 (1^st quartile)

Management: 85/226 (2^nd quartile)¹

JRI’s aim to cultivate theoretical, empirical and intervention-oriented studies of the normative governance, practice and assessment of research and innovation is, I believe, well reflected in level and diversity of these rankings.

Until now, JRI has operated as a hybrid journal, but starting in 2021 all content (past, present and future) will be freely available to everyone everywhere. This is an extremely satisfying outcome since the move will likely increase access, circulation and visibility of the journal. Furthermore, the publisher has agreed to a number of rather exceptional terms meant to offset potential difficulties for authors who may not have access to institutional or grant funds to cover article publishing charges.

In all, the goals of the OA conversion are to retain our current authorship (including graduate students, junior and independent scholars, and professionals) and article genres (including theoretical work that may not be tied to grants), to continue to expand JRI into globally and economically diverse scholarly regions, and to significantly increase JRI's access, visibility and circulation.

The main terms consist of a tiered model. Thus, for 2021, Article Publishing Charges (APCs) will be $1500 for Research Articles and $600 for Perspectives. Automatic waivers of 50-100% will be granted to authors in developing nations based on World Bank Criteria ² and a limited number of discretionary waivers will be available each year for select authors who lack funds to cover APCs. The publisher has also agreed to offer flexibility in some cases for special issues. I really do think this OA model makes a positive statement.

It is also worth noting that JRI was found to provide the largest share of the published literature on ‘RRI.’ According to our publisher, out of the 13 top journals that comprise the field of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), JRI occupies fully one third of this space and more than twice that of any other journal. ³ One can say that this is to be expected, but it's good to have confirmation that this is indeed the case—and the case by a wide margin. Moreover, their definition of RRI is very broad and includes what some might consider to be separate fields, e.g., responsible research conduct, suggesting that the margin may actually be even wider.

Finally, turning to the contents of the present issue, regular readers will notice the hefty size of this one. Indeed, at 24 manuscripts, this is the largest issue of JRI to date. I will refrain from discussing each article in detail, but I do wish to provide a general overview of the contents of JRI volume 7, issue 3.

As in every issue of the Journal of Responsible Innovation, the contents of this issue range across a robust, multi-disciplinary and multi-level set of contexts regarding the normative governance, practice and assessment of research and innovation. This collection includes philosophical studies, theoretically informed empirical studies, the development and testing of methods, and scholarly opinions. Although the articles are published in somewhat different order, I situate them thematically here so as to help readers orient themselves to the rich collection of scholarly investigations contained herein.

Philosophical inquiries in this issue include those into values as practices versus as entities in responsible innovation (Boenink and Kudina 2020), the relation between virtue and governance as inspired by the work of Hannah Arendt (Reijers 2020), civic ethics as a source of normative legitimation for efforts aimed at responsible innovation (Lozano and Monsonís-Payá 2020) and the distribution of ethical labor across scientific communities in a dozen nations (Politi and Grinbaum 2020).

Readers will find empirical studies and assessments of programs and practices around responsible innovation that fall into several overlapping contexts. This includes national political contexts such as anticipatory governance of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis in the UK (Conley 2020), nanotechnology and equity across the Canadian R&D system (Ghiasi, Harsh, and Schiffauerova 2020), and the lack of uptake of responsible innovation policies in newly industrialized economies such as South Korea (Ko, Yoon, and Kim 2020).

Institutional and organizational level empirical investigations and assessments include reducing inequality through 3D printing in US public libraries (Woodson, Telendii, and Tolliver 2020), embedding responsible innovation in a UK synthetic biology multi-disciplinary research center (Pansera et al. 2020), researcher expectations and practices around open science in Australia (Lacey, Coates, and Herington 2020), the integration of policy-driven grand challenges into research agendas in German university settings (Kaltenbrunner 2020), and the problematic paradigm of ‘social license to operate’ as used within synthetic biology public engagement discourses (Delborne, Kokotovich, and Lunshof 2020).

A growing area of observational, conceptual and engaged research pertaining to industrial contexts include, in this issue, articles that propose responsible approaches to the digitalization of biological populations and ecosystems (Bruynseels 2020), revisit the desirability of ‘opening up’ in industrial innovation initiatives in agriculture (Van Mierlo, Beers, and Hoes 2020), assess understandings of societal engagement in Dutch technology organization (Steen and Nauta 2020), and offer lessons learned from a coordinated series of scholarly engagements with eight European companies (van de Poel et al. 2020).

Scholarly discourses, conceptualizations and methodological practices comprise their own thematic subject matter in JRI and such articles here promote the integration of inclusiveness and epistemic injustice considerations in scholarly discourses (Koch 2020), elucidate scholarly understandings of emotions in technology (Steinert and Roeser 2020), review responsible innovation concepts in school design (Deppeler and Aikens 2020), develop and test integrative methods pertaining to social labs (Timmermans et al. 2020) and professional health science practice (Lehoux et al. 2020), and offer scholarly perspectives and declarations regarding responsible onlineification of research (Braun et al. 2020), US federal regulation of biologics (Hemphill 2020) and RRI in the European research and innovation policy landscape itself (Gerber 2020).

I hope readers will enjoy this infusion of scholarly offerings around the normative practice, governance and assessment of research and innovation—and I hope it helps lay a foundation upon which we can all work to build back better.

Notes

1 Copyright: Journal Citation Reports ®, Clarivate Analytics, 2020.

2 See Taylor & Francis Author Services (2012) for more details.

3 wizdom.ai © 2020