Instructions for Authors
NEW FOR 2010 – Please note that the journal now encourages authors to complete their copyright licence to publish form online
Open access options for authors - please see below for further details
Online Submission of Manuscipts
1. All manuscripts must be submitted online. Once you have prepared your manuscript according to the instructions below please visit the online submission web site. Instructions on submitting your manuscript online can be viewed here.
Any hardcopy correspondence should be sent to the Editor-in-Chief, Dr Trevor Ogden, The Annals of Occupational Hygiene, BOHS, 5/6 Melbourne Court, Millennium Way, Pride Park, Derby DE24 8LZ, UK. The Editorial Office’s email address is annals@bohs.org
What we publish
2. Annals of Occupational Hygiene publishes original research and development material that helps reduce risk of ill-health resulting from work, and welcomes submissions in these areas. For more details, including some categories which we do not normally consider, see http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/annhyg/about.html.
3. The usual categories that we publish are Commentaries, Papers (including Review Articles), and Letters to the Editor. Commentaries and Review Articles are normally specially commissioned, and authors should not submit a review without prior consultation with the Chief Editor. Letters to the Editor may deal with any topic of interest to the readership, but are usually comments on items already published. Books and software may be submitted for independent review at the Chief Editor’s discretion.
4. The Annals aims to conform with the Code of Conduct and the Guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) http://www.publicationethics.org/, and in making a submission authors agree to having their submission dealt with in accordance with these Codes and Guidelines.
5. Submitted material must be original, and not under consideration elsewhere. If the findings have been published elsewhere in part, or if the submission is part of a closely-related series, this must be clearly stated in the letter accompanying the manuscript, and the submitted manuscript must be accompanied by a copy of the other publications (or by a copy of the other manuscripts if they are still under consideration). These should be uploaded in the submission as supplementary files. Any deceitful attempt to republish material by the author or others that has already appeared or submitted elsewhere will be treated as serious malpractice, and action will be taken in accordance with COPE procedures. Submitted manuscripts may be screened with iThenticate software.
Preparing a submission
6. Language. Manuscripts must be in English. Most Annals readers are not native speakers of English, so authors should try to write in a way which is simple and clear. British or American styles and spelling may be used, but should be used consistently, and words or phrases which might be unclear in other parts of the world should be avoided. It is the authors’ responsibility to provide a text in good English, and authors whose first language is not English should seek help from a native speaker or competent translator. The editors are sympathetic to the difficulties, but regrettably do not have time to do major work on English, and major problems may lead to rejection.
If you are an author and particularly if English is not your first language, you may wish to use a professional language editor before submitting your manuscript. Language editing does not guarantee that your manuscript will be accepted for publication. If you would like information about one such service please click here. There are other specialist language editing companies that offer similar services and you can also use any of these. Authors are liable for all costs associated with such services.
7. Brevity. The necessary length of a paper depends on the subject, but any submission must be as brief as possible consistent with clarity. The number of words, excluding the abstract, references, tables and Figs, must be stated as a message to the Editor at the time of submission. If this length is more than 5000 words, a statement must be included justifying the extra length, and papers without this information may be returned unread. Suitable extra material can be included in the on-line edition only (see para 16, Supplementary Material below).
8. Title, abstract and keywords. These are important because most readers find papers by internet search of subjects, not by browsing the journal. Recognisable, searchable terms and keywords must be included to enable readers to more effectively find your paper. The title should clearly summarise the subject of the paper. The abstract should contain the top five words and phrases that an internet searcher who is interested in your paper might use. The keywords provide an opportunity to list (typically up to five) additional alternative search terms, for example alternative names for chemicals or processes.
9. Authorship. Persons should only be named as authors if they have made significant identifiable intellectual contributions to the work; other contributions may be recognised by acknowledgement at the end of the submission. For further details of our policy, see http://annhyg.oxfordjournals.org/content/51/8/651.full.pdf html . All authors should individually email the Editorial Office annals@bohs.
10. Structure of paper. Papers should generally conform to the pattern: Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, and Conclusions, unless these are clearly inappropriate. A paper must be prefaced by an abstract of the argument and findings, which may also be arranged under the same headings. As with many other journals, we are unable to publish footnotes to the text. Please therefore incorporate this sort of material into the body of the paper, in brackets if appropriate.
11. Design and analysis. The quality of the data and analysis must always be good enough to justify the inferences and conclusions drawn. Particular attention should be given to design of sampling surveys, which should be planned using modern statistical principles, and to the treatment of results below the limit of detection (see http://annhyg.oxfordjournals.org/content/54/3/255.full.pdf html )
12. Units and symbols. SI units must be used, though their equivalent in other systems may be given as well.
13. Figures. These include photographs, diagrams and charts. The first submission should include good quality low resolution copies of Figures, and it is helpful to reviewers to incorporate them in the text should be uploaded with the first submission, incorporating them in the text or at the end.
The revised version of the paper, after review, should be accompanied by high-resolution electronic copies in a form and of a quality suitable for reproduction. They should be about the size they are to be reproduced, with font size at least 6 point, using the standard Adobe set of fonts. Fine hairlines should be avoided and clear hatching patterns should be used in preference to solid grey shadings wherever possible. They should be uploaded as separate files. Figures will appear in colour in the on-line edition, but if colour is required in the print edition authors will be charge £350 per Figure. If a Figure is to appear in black and white in the print edition, authors should ensure that it makes sense without colour and that its caption does not refer to colour. Please state your preferred option (i.e. agreement to pay £350/figure for print or colour online-only with no charge) upon submission through the online site.
14. Tables. Tables should be numbered consecutively and given a suitable caption. As with Figures, it is helpful to incorporate them into the text of the first submission, but in the revised version each table typed on a separate page. Footnotes to tables should be typed below the table and should be referred to by superscript lowercase letters.
15. References. References should only be included which are essential to the development of an argument or hypothesis, or which describe methods for which the original account is too long to be reproduced. References in the text should be in the form Jones (1995), or Jones and Brown (1995), or Jones et al. (1995) if there are more than two authors. For example:
Jones and Brown (1995) observed total breakdown of control..., or
Total breakdown of control has sometimes been observed (Jones and Brown, 1995; Horspath et al., 2006).
At the end of the paper, references should be listed in alphabetical order by name of first author, using the Vancouver Style of abbreviation and punctuation. ISBNs should be given for books and other publications where appropriate. Material unobtainable by readers should not be cited. Personal Communications, if essential, should be cited in the text in the form (Professor S.M. Rappaport, University of California). Internet material can be referred to if it is likely to be permanently available; the date on which it was last accessed should be given. References will not be checked editorially, and their accuracy is the responsibility of authors.
Examples:
Simpson AT, Groves JA, Unwin J, Piney M. (2000) Mineral oil metal working fluids (MWFs)—Development of practical criteria for mist sampling. Ann Occup Hyg; 44: 165–72.
Vincent JH. (1989) Aerosol sampling: science and practice. Chichester, UK: John Wiley. ISBN 0 471 92175 0.
Swift DL, Cheng Y-S, Su Y-F, Yeh H-C. (1994) Ultrafine aerosol deposition in the human nasal and oral passages. In Dodgson J, McCallum RI, editors. Inhaled Particles VII. Oxford: Elsevier Science. p. 77–81. ISBN 0 08 040841 9 H.
British Standards Institution. (1986). BS 6691: 1986. Fume from welding and allied processes. Part 1. Guide to methods for the sampling and analysis of particulate matter. London: British Standards Institution.
Morse SS. (1995) Factors in the emergence of infectious diseases. Emerg Infect Dis [serial online] 1995 Jan–Mar;1(1). Available from: URL: http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/ EID/eid.htm (accessed 25 Oct 2010)
16. Supplementary material. Supporting material that is not essential for the argument of the paper, but would nevertheless benefit the reader, can be submitted for the on-line edition only. Examples are more detailed descriptions of methods, extended data sets/data analysis, or additional figures (including colour), or audio or video files. The final version of a supplementary text file will be converted to a pdf and uploaded to the website as submitted if it is satisfactory, so care should be taken to clearly include title and authors and its relation to the paper which it supplements. Ensure that the supplementary material is referred to in the main text where necessary, for example as '(see supplementary material in online edition)' or '(see supplementary Figure 1 in online edition)'. Figures and Tables in the main paper and supplementary material should be numbered in different sequential series, using, for example, Fig S1, S2 etc in the supplementary material.
17. Ethics. If requested, authors must produce original data for inspection by the editor. Possible fraud may be referred to the authors’ institutions. Studies carried out on human subjects, other than measurements in the course of their normal work activities, must have been approved by a competent ethics committee using the standards of the Helsinki Declaration of the World Medical Association http://www.wma.net/e/policy/b3.htm.
The ethics committee which gave approval must be named in the paper.
18. Funding and Conflicts of interest. There must be a statement at the end of the main text which must give:
the source of financial support for the work, unless it is clear from the authors' affiliations;
any involvement of the authors are in legal testimony or consultancy related to the material in the paper;
any interest in for example commercial products discussed in the paper.
Other conflicts of interest must be declared to the Editor at the time of submission, such as important relevant stock holdings by authors. These conflicts will not necessarily prevent publication, but the Editor may decide that the declaration should be included in the paper.
19. NIH funding. For work funded by the US National Institutes of Health, the following practice should be followed in the declaration of funding at the end of the main text.
• The sentence should begin: ‘This work was supported by …’
• The full official funding agency name should be given, i.e. ‘National Institutes of Health’, not ‘NIH’ (full RIN-approved list of UK funding agencies)
• Grant numbers should be given in brackets as follows: ‘[grant number xxxx]’
• Multiple grant numbers should be separated by a comma as follows: ‘[grant numbers xxxx, yyyy]’
• Agencies should be separated by a semi-colon (plus ‘and’ before the last funding agency)
• Where individuals need to be specified for certain sources of funding the following text should be added after the relevant agency or grant number 'to [author initials]'.
An example is given here: ‘This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health [AA123456 to C.S., BB765432 to M.H.]; and the Alcohol & Education Research Council [hfygr667789].’
See para 27 below about deposit of NIH-funded papers.
How we work
20. Quality. All submissions which include scientific data or opinions are normally sent to at least two reviewers (referees), selected for expertise and having regard to the international nature of the journal. Authors are invited to suggest the names and addresses of up to three independent reviewers when they submit a paper, but these reviewers will not necessarily be used. After considering reviewers’ comments, the editor will inform the author whether or not the paper is acceptable, and what modifications, if any, are necessary. Reviewers’ anonymised comments will be transmitted to the author with the editor’s decision. The decision will reflect not only technical considerations, but the priority of the material, bearing in mind pressure on space. The editor may make minor editorial changes to accepted material.
21. Speed. The editors’ target is to send a decision to the author within two months of receiving a paper. In practice the median time achieved is about seven weeks.
22. Appeals. The decision of the editor is normally final, but an author may appeal
(a) if the procedures spelt out here or published by COPE (see paragraph 4) have not been properly followed;
(b) if the author can show that the objections by the editor and reviewers to the paper are based on major misunderstandings;
(c) if the author can suggest ways of overcoming the major criticisms of the paper.
Because we receive many more papers than we have room for, the editors have to make a judgement on the importance of a paper, and appeals against this judgement are not normally useful. Appeals should be addressed to the editor who dealt with the submission and copied to the Editor in Chief. Authors may also appeal to the Committee on Publication Ethics if the matter is within its competence. Details are given at http://www.publicationethics.org/
The revised version
23. Authors invited to submit a revised version must prepare it as instructed in the letter they will receive. Particular care should be taken to prepare and upload Figures in accordance with those instructions.
After acceptance
24. After clearance by the Editorial Office, papers are passed to the publishers, Oxford University Press (OUP), who handle subsequent stages. OUP will send the corresponding author a link to a licence, which permits us to publish the paper, and authors are encouraged to complete this on-line.
Please note that by submitting an article for publication you confirm that you are the corresponding/submitting author and that Oxford University Press ("OUP") may retain your email address for the purpose of communicating with you about the article. You agree to notify OUP immediately if your details change. If your article is accepted for publication OUP will contact you using the email address you have used in the registration process. Please note that OUP does not retain copies of rejected articles.
25. Optional open access. Authors have the option, at an additional charge, to make their paper freely available online immediately upon publication, under the Oxford Open initiative. After your manuscript is accepted, as part of the mandatory licence form you will be asked to indicate whether or not you wish to pay to have your paper made freely available immediately. Please note the information here about the Creative Commons licence. If you do not select the Open Access option, your paper will be published with standard subscription-based access and you will not be charged.
You can pay Open Access charges using our Author Services site. This will enable you to pay online with a credit/debit card, or request an invoice by email or post. Open access charges can be viewed here in detail; discounted rates are available for authors based in some developing countries (click here for a list of qualifying countries). Please note that these charges are in addition to any colour charges that may apply.
26. Corresponding authors will receive pdf proofs via e-mail, on which only minor alterations may be made. At publication, the corresponding author of a published paper will receive a URL for free access to the on-line article; but if desired paper reprints may also be ordered when the proofs are returned. Papers are normally published soon after clearance of the proofs, on the journal's advance publication website http://annhyg.oupjournals.org/papbyrecent.dtl . The journal uses the digital object identifier (doi) system, which enables the paper to be indexed and cited at this stage in a way which remains valid after transfer to an issue. The paper will be later be transferred to the on-line and print editions of an issue of the journal.
Author Self-Archiving and public access
27. For information about this journal's policy, please visit our Author Self-Archiving policy page. Oxford Journals will deposit all NIH-funded articles in PubMed Central. See http://www.oxfordjournals.org/for_authors/repositories.htmlfor details. Authors must ensure that manuscripts are clearly indicated as NIH-funded using the guidelines in para 19 above.
