Annals of Occupational Hygiene at volume 50: many achievements, a few mistakes, and an interesting future.
The past 10 years have seen a doubling of the number of papers submitted to the Annals, and a 5-fold increase in the number of institutions with access to the journal. Electronic access is now far more important than print access. Papers from British authors dominated the first 20 years of the journal, but the rest of Europe is now more important, with Scandinavia and The Netherlands being the major continental sources. North America is the other major source. For British papers, there has been a big growth in government authors, and a decline in papers from industry and armed forces. From many possible topics, trends are selectively reviewed in: standards and exposure limits; measurement methods and criteria; sampling strategy and statistics; fibres; control banding; dermal exposure; and evaluation of control. For the future, we will continue to have the same aims and standards, but the changes of the past few years, and the growth of new approaches such as open access, have emphasized the difficulty of forecasting. The growth in submissions from countries which we presently regard as 'developing', and especially the growth in higher education in China, and the amount of occupational disease there, are bound to have major impacts. Perhaps the English language will not continue to dominate scientific publishing, but in any case an eastward shift in the source of papers must lead to other changes.