Environmental Health Perspectives

Environmental Health Perspectives  
Discipline Environmental health
Language English
Edited by Sally Perreault Darney, PhD
Publication details
Publisher
Publication history
 1972-present
Frequency Monthly
Yes
License Public domain
7.977 (2014)
Indexing
ISSN 0091-6765 (print)
1552-9924 (web)
LCCN 76642723
CODEN EVHPAZ
OCLC no. 01727134
Links

Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP) is a peer-reviewed journal published monthly with support from the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). The primary purposes of EHP are to communicate recent scientific findings and trends in the environmental health sciences; to improve the environmental health knowledge base among researchers, administrators, and policy makers; and to inform the public about important topics in environmental health. For 2014 EHP has an impact factor of 7.98.[1]

EHP publishes original research, reviews, commentaries, editorials, and news from a wide range of scientific disciplines encompassing basic research, human studies, and in vitro and in vivo research with a clear relationship to human health effects. The journal also publishes a bimonthly Chinese-language edition.[2]

Research areas that are highly represented in EHP include epidemiology, toxicology, exposure science, risk assessment, public health, and climate change. In addition, each issue includes a section devoted to children's health research, and each year children's health is the focus of the October issue. EHP also addresses ethical, legal, social, and policy issues, as well as studies dealing with ecological issues or effects on wildlife when the relevance of their findings to human health is evident.[3]

EHP is a fully open-access journal; its content is available free of charge online. EHP supports global environmental health research through its policy of open access and commitment to dissemination of research and information to the developing world.[4]

As a publication of the Federal Government of the United States, EHP's content is considered public domain, except for images that have been licensed for illustrative purposes.[5]

EHP charges no submission or publication fees. The journal provides Advance Publication versions of papers upon acceptance and deposits their content into PubMed.[6]

Through its presence on Twitter and Facebook, EHP publicizes new content, appearances at meetings, and news items of interest to the environmental health community. It also uses these platforms to engage with the public and increase awareness of environmental health issues.

History

EHP was founded in 1972 as a vehicle for publishing conference proceedings in the nascent environmental health sciences. Its publisher, the NIEHS, had been established in 1969, and the inception of Earth Day in 1970 has been called the birth of the modern environmental movement. By the end of 1970, President Richard Nixon had signed the Clean Air Act Extension, which created regulatory programs governing National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS), State Implementation Plans (SIPs), New Source Performance Standards (NSPS), and National Emissions Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (NESHAPs). In 1972 the Federal Water Pollution Control Amendments, or Clean Water Act, became law. With growing awareness of environmental health issues, the journal was conceptualized by then-NIEHS director David Rall as a means for rapidly disseminating information on the emerging field.

Over the next 22 years the journal published 100 monographs, most of which arose from symposium or conference proceedings. EHP adopted its current monthly news and research format in 1993. The goal of the new format was to not only continue publishing the best environmental health research but also foster discussion among researchers and to educate the public about environmental health issues.

"Traditionally, laboratory researchers have tended to communicate primarily with each other, and the dissemination of information to the public has been slow and haphazard," original EHP editors-in-chief Gary E.R. Hook and George Lucier wrote in an editorial introducing the inaugural issue of the reformatted EHP. "It is clear that enhanced communications could contribute to the avoidance of environmental crises through both increased understanding of the underlying science and the identification of potential problems before they become overwhelming, expensive, and perhaps irreversible."[7]

The addition of editorials, commentaries, correspondence, and news sections provided the desired forum for discussion of environmental health information. The restructured journal also introduced several new formats for the publication of scientific manuscripts: research articles, brief reports, and research advances.

With the reformatted EHP, symposium and conference proceedings were published separately as EHP Supplements. This daughter series was discontinued in 2008. Today EHP publishes occasional special reports, collections, and proceedings.

Types of articles

Currently EHP publishes peer-reviewed articles in the following formats:[8]

International outreach

The journal's International Program publishes a bimonthly Chinese-language edition consisting primarily of translated EHP news, along with original or reprinted editorials, research abstracts from past issues of EHP, and occasional commentaries and reviews.[9] The Chinese edition premiered in 2001 as a quarterly publication. In 2004 EHP teamed up with the Shanghai Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention to distribute print issues of EHP Chinese Edition to 30,000 subscribers in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

EHP also collaborates with numerous foreign-language journals seeking to increase their publishing capacity, some of which also publish translated EHP content:

References

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