Ann. occup. Hyg., Vol. 46, No. 1, pp. 1, 2002
© 2002 British Occupational Hygiene Society
Published by Oxford University Press
Editorial Note
WELCOME TO 2002
The online edition and supplementary material
From this issue the Annals moves to a new publisher, Oxford University Press. Many things will not change, but there are some welcome improvements. For some years we have had an online edition, but from this issue all subscribers to the print edition (and BOHS members) will have access online at no extra charge. Such developments are everywhere seen as a revolution in scientific publishing, and we intend to exploit them while continuing to retain the other advantages of the print edition. One effect of the change is that we will be able to carry in the online edition material supplementary to the printed papers, such as large data sets. All material will continue to be peer-reviewed.
Paper numbers and length
You will notice too that this issue and the next will be double the normal size, at no extra charge to subscribers. In recent years we have had a big increase in the number of publishable papers submitted to the Annals. We have considered moving to ten issues a year, but decided for the moment to increase our rejection rate and to stay at eight issues, while publishing these two double issues to deal with the accumulated material. Our publication delay had deteriorated as a result of the increased submissions, but these measures should take us back to our former good performance. (Unlike many journals in our field, we publish the ‘final form’ receipt date with every paper, so authors and readers can monitor our performance on publication time.)
One preventable cause of too much material is papers that are needlessly long, and which if published reduce the number of other submissions we can take. We all prefer to read concise papers, but we all tend to feel that the ones we write are exceptional! After various exhortations to brevity, we have now imposed a normal limit of 4000 words on papers. Many papers ought to be much shorter than this; some genuinely need to be longer, but the arguments that authors give for greater length will be closely scrutinized!
Papers we like
Decisions on rejection rate make us think about the sort of papers that we should be publishing. Over the last few years we have been very pleased with the big improvements in the Annals’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF), particularly in comparison with other hygiene journals. The JIF is a very imperfect measure of journal performance—see Amin and Mabe (2000)—but libraries and research assessors are paying a lot of attention to it, and there is a strong incentive for journals to adjust their acceptance policies to increase their JIFs. The Annals wants to publish papers that are groundbreaking and well-cited contributions to the background science, but also papers that may never be cited by anyone but will contribute to practical control of health risk. We look for further increases in our JIF, but above all we hope that, whether you are reading the online edition via satellite telephone, or reading a dog-eared print copy on the bus home, the Annals will be interesting and helpful to you in 2002.
Trevor Ogden
Editor-in-Chief
REFERENCES
Amin M, Mabe M. (2000) Impact factors: use and abuse. Perspectives in Publishing, no.1. Oxford: Elsevier Science. Available from URL: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/editors.
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