New developments at the Annals of Occupational Hygiene.

Several new developments at the Annals of Occupa tional Hygiene (AOH) over the past year may be of interest to the readership. First, welcome to Ms Sarah Pyle as our new Editorial Manager. Sarah comes to the British Occupational Hygiene Society (BOHS) and AOH with experience working with an academic publisher in the past, and more recently with training in the law. Sarah takes over from Ms Roz Phillips, who will be working on the development of the Occupational Hygiene Training Association (OHTA) as part of services provided by BOHS. Many thanks to Roz for her work over the past 2 years working with me on establishing new methods and procedures for managing the AOH workflow and liaising with the many authors, editors, and reviewers involved in making the Annals the respected journal that it is. OHTA and BOHS are lucky to have Roz dedicating her numerous talents to expanding the scope, reach, and effectiveness of this model of global occupational hygiene training (Alesbury and Bailey, 2014). In addition, we successfully recruited Dr Svend Erik Mathiassen as a new Assistant Editor. Dr Mathiassen is Professor and Director of the Centre for Musculoskeletal Research in the Department of Occupational and Public Health Sciences at the University of Gävle, Sweden. He fills a key niche for the Annals with his expertise in ergonomics and musculoskeletal problems in the workplace, a vital and potentially growing area of attention in occupational hygiene. Dr Mathiassen also brings to the board an important perspective on occupational exposure assessment in general. His work largely focuses on the statistical validity and efficiency of exposure assessment strategies. His recent contributions have begun to elucidate the costs and benefits of alternative designs (Mathiassen et al., 2014)—areas that are equally significant for traditional airborne occupational exposures as they are for physical hazards. Responding to the need for additional accountability and transparency for potential conflicts of interest and proper assignment of authorship for the journal, we also instituted a new policy for incoming manuscripts. Since May, we have required the corresponding authors for submitted papers to fill out a form specifying their sources of support, and identifying any direct or indirect conflicts of interest following the general guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (http://publicationethics.org/). The form further asks for the contributions of each author to the submitted paper, to ensure compliance with the authorship guidelines, which we have spelled out (Ogden, 2007). Although the form can be confusing for some authors, it has enabled us on numerous occasions to obtain a fuller understanding of the paper’s provenance, and to ensure that the acknowledgements and declaration of interests included in the paper are clear and complete. In discussion with other journal editors and our publishers at Oxford University Press, we believe we’re on the right track with this procedure. We plan to clarify the information requested and update this form soon, to assist authors providing the information needed to ensure the readers are fully informed. Finally, at the beginning of last spring, we announced the availability of a new category of