We argue that editorial independence, through robust practice of publication ethics and research integrity, promotes good science and prevents bad science. We elucidate the concept of research integrity, and then discuss the dimensions of editorial independence. Best practice guidelines exist, but compliance with these guidelines varies. Therefore, we make recommendations for protecting and strengthening editorial independence.

When Margaret of Anjou died at the Chateau of Dampierre, near Saumur, on August 25, 1482 it was as a woman not only retired from the world but almost forgotten by it. She who had been for a time the virtual ruler of Lancastrian England, who had raised armies and intrigued with princes, had not enough money to pay her debts except through the uncertain charity of her uncharitable cousin, the king of France. Crushed by misfortune, bereft of power by the death of her husband and son, picked clean of her remaining rights and possessions by Louis as the price of her ransom from English captivity, she seemed to be of no interest to anybody.

The Rush of the Gentry into English schools and universities during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries has been well documented. An Elizabethan writer, William Harrison, was merely reiterating a familiar complaint when he wrote of the universities that although they had originally been founded for poor men's sons “the rich do so incroch vpon them, and so farre hath this inconueience spread it selfe that it is in my time an hard matter for a poore mans child to come by a felowship (though he be neuer so good a scholer & woorthie of that roome.)”