Dilemmas and discussions concerning knowledge security are at the heart of the mission and responsibilities of scientific endeavour; it is therefore crucial for the scientific community to deal with them scrupulously and judiciously. Given the importance and urgency of this issue, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) considers it its duty to speak out about it.
Since 2022, the Dutch scientific community has followed the National Knowledge Security Guidelines and academic institutions can contact the National Contact Point for Knowledge Security for advice. This system appears to work well. With a view to planned further measures (including the screening of non-EU researchers based on a list of high-risk disciplines), the Academy wishes to stress that such measures must at all times be underpinned by the principles of open scientific exchange, academic freedom and institutional autonomy.
The systematic screening of large groups of researchers coming to our country – as currently proposed by the Dutch government – is too imprecise and virtually impossible to implement.
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