Announcements

We are pleased to announce the appointment of Prof. Dr. Ger Rijkers as the new Editor-in-Chief of Vaccines (ISSN: 2076-393X).

Name: Prof. Dr. Ger Rijkers
Affiliation: Department of Health, Cognition and Behavior, University College Roosevelt, 4331 CB Middelburg, the Netherlands
Interests: immunology; immunodeficiency; vaccination; pneumococcal pneumonia; SARS-CoV-2

Prof. Dr. Ger Rijkers is Emeritus Professor in Biomedical and Life Sciences, Department of Health, Cognition, and Behavior at University College Roosevelt (UCR), Middelburg, the Netherlands. At UCR, he has been head of the Science Department and coordinator of the premedical program. During the academic year of 2025-2026, he is teaching the courses Mechanisms of Disease and Infection and Immunity.

Prof. Dr. Ger Rijkers studied biology at Wageningen University, the institute where he also completed his PhD in 1980 (on the immune system of cyprinid fish). He then specialized as a medical immunologist at the Wilhelmina Children’s Hospital and the Faculty of Medicine of Utrecht University. During this specialization, he spent two sabbaticals at the laboratories of Don Mosier (Philadelphia PA) and John Cambier (Denver CA), respectively. He has worked as head of the laboratory of pediatric immunology and senior researcher in the field of mucosal immunology at the Department of Gastrointestinal Surgery of Utrecht University and of Radboud University. In the St Antonius Hospital in Nieuwegein, he has supervised studies on vaccination of patients with respiratory diseases. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he worked as a medical immunologist and senior scientist at the Laboratories of Medical Microbiology and Immunology of the St Elizabeth Hospital in Tilburg and the Admiral De Ruyter Hospital in Goes, the Netherlands. As a researcher and academic, Ger Rijkers studies the interaction between the human immune system and micro-organisms of the respiratory and gastrointestinal tract in immunoregulation and healthy ageing (at the beginning and end of life).

He has supervised over 40 PhD students and published over 400 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals, as well as a textbook on immunology (3rd edition published in August 2023). He has served as Editor-in-Chief and Section Editor of several (bio)medical journals.

Ger Rijkers has been married to Riky Lievendag for 46 years. He has three adult sons and four grandchildren. When not working, he studies, with his brother Jan Rijkers, the origin and meaning of the elephant in the painting The Garden of Earthly Delights by Jheronimus Bosch.

The following is a short Q&A with Prof. Dr. Ger Rijkers, who shared his vision for the journal with us, as well as his views of the research area and open access publishing:

1. What appealed to you about the journal that made you want to take the role as its Editor-in-Chief?
Before I was approached to become Editor-in-Chief of Vaccines, I already knew the journal very well. I have published in regular issues, as well as Special Issues. My predecessor, Prof. Dr. Ralph Tripp, has done an excellent job bringing the journal forward to where it now stands. I am proud to be allowed to stand in his footsteps.

2. What is your vision for the journal?
Vaccines has a broad scope, ranging from the fundamental aspects of identifying the antigens and epitopes which could lead to protective immunity to overcoming vaccine hesitance or even resistance. Because public opinion and even government policies towards vaccines and vaccination have changed, vaccine policy and public health issues are major concerns. The journal could play a role here, maybe by translating the outcome of studies in plain language, addressing a lay audience.
While, as indicated above, the political climate has changed, the meteorological climate is also changing. This will inevitably have an impact on the spread of infectious diseases, and thus also on vaccine and vaccination policies worldwide.

3. What does the future of this field of research look like?
We are proud to welcome and present the research and perspectives of many researchers and policy makers across the world, working on all aspects of vaccines and vaccination. We thus strive to contribute to further improvement of the health of all people in the world, especially the most vulnerable. Thus far, vaccination has been mainly used for protection against infectious diseases. For some of them, vaccination has been extremely successful and has led, or can lead, to complete eradication of the disease. For others, especially AIDS, malaria, and parasitic infections, there is a long way to go. Anti-tumor vaccines and vaccines against autoimmune diseases are in early stages of development.

4. What do you think of the development of open access research in the publishing field?
I recall the situation from long, long ago when I published my first papers. At that time, as an author you could order reprints of your paper. Afterwards, you received postcards from all over the world, mostly low-income countries, of fellow researchers requesting a reprint of your paper. If your library did not have a subscription to a wide range of journals, you just could not keep up with your field. “The times they are a changin’” is the Bob Dylan song, indicating that the world is changing, including the publishing world (“You better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone”). In my home country, the Netherlands, the government wants all researchers to publish open access, so that everyone can read the outcome of studies financed by the government. As a researcher, you want everyone to be able to read what you have work on and discovered. The same holds true for the publisher.

We wish Prof. Dr. Ger Rijkers every success in his new position, and we look forward to his contributions to the journal.