Philip Campbell is a former Editor in Chief of Nature. He is an astrophysicist and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was knighted for services to science in 2015.
He sent the following comment about the change in policy at Nature and Science in 1998 regarding the immediate release of protein structural data upon publication:
Thanks for getting in touch about this topic and the valuable work on this strand of research history.
Background: I had the responsibility for working with colleagues in developing editorial policies for Nature and the Nature journals throughout my time as Editor in Chief of Nature (1995-2018) and then as Editor in Chief of Springer Nature, until my retirement from science publishing in 2023.
The substantial policy change you mention was one of the first that I can recall making. Memory plays tricks, especially over decades. However, as I recall, the trigger for the joint statement came from Floyd Bloom.
Floyd was Editor in Chief of Science at the time I (re)joined Nature. He contacted me at some point to introduce himself. He and my predecessor John Maddox had been in contact as the two members of what John had called “the smallest club in the world”: Editor in Chiefs of the two multidisciplinary science journals that also pursued journalism.
I had good relationships with Floyd and his successors. A key principle of these relationships was that, in the interests of researchers, editorial policy can be developed collaboratively between otherwise competitive journals, rather than being a basis of that competitiveness.
The first time this principle was experienced by me was when (as I hazily recall) Floyd raised the issue of open structural data. He was in favour of the journals simultaneously making the change, to compulsory openness.
This was certainly in response to changing needs and interests expressed by structural biologists. In general, editorial policy has sometimes followed in the wake of community change and on other occasions has come in at an early stage, after consultation, in order to encourage such community change. In retrospect, I’d say that this particular policy change was belated.
I discussed Floyd’s proposal with my colleagues, who were well aware of the community advocacy and controversies about our previous policies. No doubt we had already been considering the idea of a policy change. Colleagues were understandably cautious because there could be authors, especially those in industry, who might not be able or willing to submit important papers under such a condition.
As a compromise, I and my colleagues decided that Nature should make the change, but that Nature Structural Biology (NSB - now Nature Structural and Molecular Biology) should allow a six-month embargo period. NSB’s founding Chief Editor Guy Riddihough (or maybe a successor) subsequently changed to the fully open policy (I cannot remember when), by which time they no doubt perceived that the risk of losing important research publications was smaller than feared.
The idea that Science would make the change at the same time as Nature was an important source of internal reassurance, while also sending a strong signal for the need for change to those in the community who might still resist it.
So Floyd and I agreed on that simultaneous policy change in Nature and Science.
To me, the research and development benefits of sharing structural data were obvious. The broader push then and ever since has always been in that direction of openness, whether for research data, materials or, more recently, computer code.
However, any new editorial policy is likely to place an additional demand on researchers, editors and, often, infrastructure. In particular, the resources needed to enable data openness should never be forgotten. In 2012 the Royal Society published a report ‘Science as an Open Enterprise’. I was a co-author and had successfully urged that the report include specific examples of databases, with their services and costs included. The substantial services and costs of the PDB at that time can be found on page 92 of the report:
https://royalsociety.org/-/media/policy/projects/sape/2012-06-20-saoe.pdf