Until approximately 1995, the Netherlands had a very low prison rate compared to the surrounding countries. David Downes, who made a comparison between the Dutch and the British penal policy, choose as a title for his book: Contrasts in Tolerance. He attributed the differences between England & Wales and the Netherlands, partly to the tolerant culture in the Netherlands compared to England & Wales (Downes, 1985: 69 e.v.). What exactly did he mean by tolerance in this context and in how far can this characteristic of Dutch penal policy explain the recent downfall of the Dutch prison population.

This column reacts to the use of the word ‘Djuka’ (spelled variously) for the Suriname Maroons. This word, although derived from the perfectly respectable tribal name of Ndyuka, is widely considered today as a term of abuse and interpreted to mean ‘shit of the Jews’. It has therefore become unusable in serious literature.

In 2011 it was revealed that the Dutch social-psychologist Diederik Stapel from Tilburg University faked his experiments and fabricated findings.Many of his PhD-students relied upon his statistical data and, as a result, their dissertations and publications have been qualified as fraudulent. Here I wilI focus mainly on gaining access to the PhD-students. I show that trust and distrust played an essential part in the communication with these respondents. Some of them state that the framing of Stapel as the evil mastermind is not coherent with their experience. They also define him as an enthusiastic and brilliant supervisor who was interested in their work.

The intensification of scientific competition and the availability of scientific knowledge on the internet seem to be rendering the notion of intellectual property obsolete. Conventional citation- and referencing practices through which intellectual debt is acknowledged are increasingly being ignored or undermined. In this essay, it is argued that these conventional citation- and referencing practices represent valuable norms of scientific conduct and, therefore, are vital to the scientific ethos of free and independent scientific research. For this reason, editors and reviewers need to accept their responsibility for educating the next generation of scholars to respect conventions for acknowledging intellectual debt.