About Environmental Health

What is Environmental Health?

Environmental Health is an open access, peer-reviewed, online journal that considers manuscripts on all aspects of environmental and occupational medicine, and related studies in toxicology and epidemiology.

Environmental Health is aimed at scientists and practitioners in all areas of environmental science where human health and well-being are involved, either directly or indirectly. Environmental Health is a public health journal serving the public health community and scientists working on matters of public health interest and importance pertaining to the environment.

This journal is the only truly open access, peer-reviewed journal devoted exclusively to Environmental Health, and thus serves the important objective of making reliable and important scientific information widely and easily available, without charge, to readers worldwide.

Content overview

Environmental Health considers the following types of articles:

• Research - articles presenting the results of original scientific research in the field of environmental health.
• Case reports - well-described reports of cases that: can be used for educational purposes, as a necessary reminder of an important clinical lesson; describe a diagnostic or therapeutic dilemma; suggest the need for change in practice or thinking in terms of diagnosis or prognosis but not in terms of preventive or therapeutic intervention, which require stronger evidence; suggest an association between two conditions; or that present an important adverse reaction to treatment.
• Commentaries - these articles are usually related to a contemporary issue, such as recent research findings, and are often written by opinion leaders invited by the Editorial Board. They focus on specific issues and are about 1500 words.
• Hypotheses - articles that present an untested original hypothesis backed up solely by a survey of previously published results rather than any new evidence. Hypothesis articles should not be reviews and should not contain new data; they should ideally be short articles (maximum 1500 words) outlining significant progress in thinking that would also be testable, though not so easily testable that readers will wonder why the testing has not already been done.
• Methodology - these articles should present a new experimental method, test or procedure. The method described may either be completely new, or may offer a better version of an existing method. The article must describe a demonstrable advance on what is currently available. The method needs to have been well tested and ideally, but not necessarily, used in a way that proves its value.
• Reviews - summaries of recent insights in specific research areas within the scope of Environmental Health; they can be submitted either upon specific invitation or editorial acceptance of an author's proposal. To submit a proposal, authors should send a tentative title and abstract to the Editorial Office, justifying their expertise in the target area, the scientific relevance and the lack of recent reviews on the topic.

Peer review policies

• All peer review for Environmental Health is open, meaning that firstly, the reviewers' names are included on the peer review reports, and secondly that, if the manuscript is published, the reports are published along with the article as part of a 'pre-publication history'. The pre-publication history lists all the versions of the manuscript, all the signed reviews, and all responses to the reviewers since the submission of the manuscript until its publication.
• For manuscripts deemed suitable for peer review two reviews will be sought.
• Reviewers may be members of the Editorial Board or external experts in the field.
• Reviewers are asked to declare any competing interests they may have in reviewing a manuscript.
• The journal aims for a first decision to be made within 6 weeks of receipt of the submission.
• The Editors-in-Chief will make the final decision on publication.
• If an author is unhappy with, or formally appeals, an editorial decision then the journal's Ombudsman will review the decision in accordance with the procedures outlined in the COPE Code of Conduct for Editors.

Edited by Philippe Grandjean and David Ozonoff, Environmental Health is supported by an expert Editorial Board.

Publishing in Environmental Health

All articles are listed in PubMed immediately upon acceptance (after peer review), and are covered by PubMed Central, MEDLINE, Thomson Reuters (ISI), CAS, CABI, Embase, PAIS International and Current Contents.

Articles in Environmental Health should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal. However, because articles in this journal are not printed, they do not have page numbers. Instead, they have a unique article number.

The following citation:

Environ Health 2004, 2:1

refers to article 1 from volume 2 of the journal.

As an online journal, Environmental Health does not have issue numbers. Each volume corresponds to a calendar year.

To keep up to date with the latest articles from Environmental Health, why not register to receive alerts? Registration also enables you to customise your subject areas of interest, store your searches, and submit your manuscripts.

Submission of manuscripts

Manuscripts should be submitted electronically to Environmental Health using the online submission system. Full details of how to submit a manuscript are given in the instructions for authors.

General journal policies

Environmental Health is published by BioMed Central, part of Springer Science+Business Media. BioMed Central is committed to ensuring peer-reviewed biomedical research is open access. That means it is freely and universally accessible online, it is archived in at least one internationally recognised free access repository, and its authors retain copyright, allowing anyone to reproduce or disseminate articles, according to the BioMed Central copyright and licence agreement. Environmental Health however, has taken this further by making all its content open access.

Environmental Health's articles are archived in PubMed Central, the US National Library of Medicine's full-text repository of life science literature, and also at INIST in France and in e-Depot, the National Library of the Netherlands' digital archive of all electronic publications. The journal is also participating in the British Library's e-journals pilot project, and plans to deposit copies of all articles with the British Library.

BioMed Central is working closely with Thomson Reuters (ISI) to ensure that citation analysis of articles published in Environmental Health will be available.

Environmental Health is able to deliver summaries of frequently updated content via Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. These are accessible via the orange "XML" button at the top of the list of recent articles or the list of most accessed articles. For more information about RSS feeds see our publisher's website.

For further information about general policies please see the instructions for authors.