Change, challenges, and core values.

In the last issue, Trevor Ogden (2012) provided us his reflections on the accomplishments, progress, and challenges of the Annals of Occupational Hygiene under his leadership since 1997. Few would dispute that Trevor’s contributions to the journal have been many: maintaining a commitment to high quality scholarship, seeing the journal through the advent of online publication processes and Internet access, increasing connection to the international community of authors, readers and research subjects, and responding to the increasing financial pressures on academic publishing. For that, we are grateful to Trevor for his leadership. And I, in particular, am grateful to Trevor for leaving me with a well-respected and smoothly functioning journal, and an organization to support it. Nevertheless, the changes and challenges confronting us as a profession, as a research community, and as a traditional academic journal are many. I plan to continue to keep the Annals in the forefront of the science of occupational hygiene. Those of us involved in occupational hygiene, either as a practitioner, researcher, teacher or as a student of the science, are aware that the field is rapidly changing. Advances in data processing and statistical methods have transformed the models used in decision making and estimation, and the explosion of technologies for personal data collection and tracking holds potential for revolutionizing exposure assessment. Advances in measurement technologies that measure multiple analytes at lower levels of detection, in real time with increasingly miniature instruments continue to develop, allowing for increasingly specific personal exposure metrics. And the integration of biologically-based parameters into exposure measures increasingly informs our understanding of what aspects of exposure are most relevant. In all of these areas, occupational hygiene science offers the promise of more effective preventive policies and practices. However, many other factors are challenging our ability to accomplish our goals. The scope of industrial hygiene practice is necessarily broadening to address innovations in production technologies and processes, more diverse and global workforces, and alternative forms of work organization. Funding for occupational health research is more and more restricted, while academics are pressured to produce more publications. Full-time residential programs are shrinking, and distance, online and part-time instruction is becoming commonplace. Given these myriad changes and challenges, I reflect here on some of the ways that the Annals can continue developing as an active, vibrant, and relevant journal for occupational hygiene. The Annals needs to broaden its scope in order to address the increasingly complex world that occupational hygienists confront, while maintaining its core strengths in measurement and control of workplace exposures. For instance, strain due to ergonomic stressors is typical of the issues addressed by many occupational hygienists. The risk of acute injury has not been a common subject for Annals articles, but as it is amenable to a hygienic approach—that is, measurement or control of ‘exposure’ to conditions associated with risk of injury—thus, studies addressing injuries would be well within the Annals’ scope Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +1 206-685-7189; e-mail: [email protected]