Outreach at Environmental Health Perspectives
Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP) is a leading journal in public, environmental, and occupational health and environmental sciences. The journal, which contains both peer-reviewed research and news, is published by the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, a component of the National Institutes of Health. EHP receives more than 1200 research manuscripts a year and has an acceptance rate of 22%. Its impact factor is 6.12, making it the top monthly journal in public, environmental, and occupational health and the second-ranked monthly journal in environmental sciences. With our success comes the responsibility to share information with local, national, and international communities. Through our initiatives in outreach and education, we reach researchers, health practitioners, policy makers, students, and others throughout the world.
Capacity building for journals in developing countries is the cornerstone of EHP’s outreach efforts. Through our partnerships with selected environmental, occupational health, public health, and medical journals in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, EHP is committed to increasing the quality and visibility of these journals and making them a better resource not only for local researchers and policy makers but for worldwide audiences. EHP accomplishes that by providing training and mentorship to journal authors, editors, and administrators and by translating content from EHP into local languages.
EHP has partnerships in China with the Shanghai Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention (SCDC), in Brazil with Ciência & Saúde Coletiva (CSC), in Chile with Ciencia y Trabajo (C&T), and in Mexico with Salud Pública de México (SPM). In partnership with SCDC, EHP publishes a quarterly edition of EHP in Chinese. The EHP Chinese edition consists mostly of news articles first published in EHP. CSC publishes selected EHP review articles in Portuguese, and C&T and SPM publish selected EHP articles in Spanish in their journals. EHP is an active player in the African Journal Partnership Project, a multinational initiative that focuses on journal capacity building in Africa. EHP and Mali Medical have reciprocal links on their Web sites.
Editors of our partner journals serve on EHP’s editorial board. This enables our partner journals to understand EHP’s activities better and to become more familiar with its editorial process. EHP has also identified top researchers in China, India, Mexico, and Thailand to serve as regional editors. The regional editors contribute editorials that discuss environmental health concerns and related developments in their regions.
Researchers from many developing countries must publish in English-language journals to advance in their careers. EHP receives submissions from around the world. However, our editors often find that the authors are unfamiliar with the expectations of English-language journals. Training in scientific writing is important for all scientists, but it may be crucial for authors for whom English is a second language. EHP’s newest outreach initiative is to offer scientific-writing workshops to scientists worldwide. The workshops cover a variety of topics, including the publication process, the structure of a paper, the peerreview process, scientific-writing style, and writing in English as a foreign language. Through these workshops, EHP hopes to help researchers worldwide to reach their potential for high-quality scholarly publishing.
EHP also seeks to invest in the future of environmental health science by increasing students’ awareness of the link between the environment and human health. EHP’s science-education program provides educators and others with interdisciplinary lessons based on selected news and research articles in the journal. More than 100 lessons have been created to help in teaching highschool and college students biology, chemistry, environmental science, and physical science and to advance their critical-thinking skills. Through our science-education program, EHP is dedicated to sharing with students and educators the excitement and satisfaction of careers in environmental health science.
Banalata Sen, an editor at Environmental Health Perspectives, is Science Education and Outreach Program Manager for the journal.