Occupational hygiene papers now available online

A British Occupational Hygiene Society product story

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team May 26, 2004

While the BOHS will continue to publish its Annals, the peer-reveiwed papers are now available online immediatley; anyone can access the abstracts for free, with no need to subscribe.

The 'Annals of Occupational Hygiene' has been the British Occupational Hygiene Society's (BOHS's) research journal for 46 years, and is now one of the world's longest-standing and leading publications in the field.

But it is going through a 21st-century revolution which has major benefits for its authors, readers and editorial team alike.

The latest change is that when a research paper has been accepted and the proof corrections have been processed, it is published on a special website, which means that a paper no longer has to wait in the queue to appear in the next available issue.

Under the previous system, papers might have waited months to appear.

Now, they will still appear in a forthcoming issue of the Annals, but are available immediately to other researchers and those who want to apply the findings.

Moreover, anyone can read the abstracts, via the Annals site http://annhyg.oupjournals.org/, although only subscribers or BOHS members can get the full texts.

Annals readers are already benefiting from a previous stage in the revolution, which introduced the on-line edition.

This has the big advantage that the whole text of the 320 papers from the last five years can now be searched on-line.

The publisher, Oxford University Press (OUP), makes the Annals available in various packages, and about three times as many organisations get the journal on-line as subscribe to the print edition.

In addition, OUP make its on-line journals available free or at low cost to non-profit institutions in developing or low-income countries, and 750 institutes have taken advantage of this.

The number of downloads of Annals papers is doubling every six months, and has now reached 14,000 a month.

About 80 per cent of Annals papers come from outside Britain, emphasising the international reach of the journal.

Until last year they had to be submitted by post to the editorial offices in Derby or in the USA.

As almost every paper then had to be sent for vetting by an international team of reviewers, this could take a considerable time.

But all of this is now done on-line, with authors uploading their submissions direct from their computers to a secure website, where reviewers anywhere in the world can be given access.

This gives authors a much faster service.

"The batch of papers just put on-line is a good illustration of the international nature of our business," says Dr Trevor Ogden, Annals' editor-in-chief.

"It includes ones on exposure to a toxic drug in hospitals from the Netherlands, to paint spray in car body repair shops from Spain, and to dust and terpenes in carpentry shops, and two on possible hazardous emissions from biofuels from separate teams in Scandinavia".

But there is an additional, hidden benefit to the editorial team from the on-line revolution.

"We can now tell how many times each individual paper is downloaded," says Trevor, "so for the first time we know what our readers are most interested in.

It was a big surprise to find last year that the most popular items were the commentaries we published on old 'classic' papers from past years.

We are thinking about the implications of this for the sorts of things we ought to carry".

"But we don't want to get carried away by the quest for popularity.

"We can be sure that any paper on asbestos risk is going to get a lot more downloads than a paper on vibration control, but we will never reject a paper on a subject like vibration just because not many people will read it immediately.

"Like the rest of occupational hygiene, our ultimate business is elimination or control of all occupational health risks, and that has to remain our long-term aim".