Instruction for Authors

1. About the journal

The Environmental and Occupational Health Practice (EOH-P), a peer reviewed journal of the Japan Society for Occupational Health, which takes a broader approach than JOH (http://joh-journal.jp/), welcoming papers from across the occupational health and allied areas. EOH-P primarily seeks to publish reports on knowledge gained through practice, which has important empirical value for occupational health. It also seeks to publish papers on environment issues.

More specifically, the scope of this journal covers papers describing practical activities and good practice in Occupational Safety and Health (OSH), as well as reports on environmental issues that remain problematic, such as exposure to high concentrations of toxic substances in the fields of not only occupational setting but also natural or urban environment. The journal also actively discusses issues and topics without much previous coverage, such as OSH in medium and small-sized enterprises and for immigrant workers, as well as OSH problems encountered in general clinical care. The journal also welcomes practitioners’ expressing concerns for future research.

EOH-P also accepts reports on the development or usage of tools for OSH activities, exploratory research that has the potential for expansion (including scale development studies), and methodology studies detailing new initiatives or adjustments useful for work practices. The journal’s publication criteria are based on the rigor of the methodology and the appropriate interpretations so that studies reporting negative results are also considered for publication. Specialized OSH videos and open data are welcomed as supplementary files.

2. Policies

The Editorial Board decides whether a contribution will be sent for peer review, and if so, it will consider the peer reviewers’ reports and make the final decision to accept or reject the manuscript for publication. The Editorial Board reserves the final right to decide the section (manuscript type) in which the paper will be published if it is found to be acceptable for publication.

Submission of a manuscript to the EOH-P implies that it has not been published elsewhere, that it does not duplicate material already published in any language elsewhere, and that it is not in submission elsewhere.

Embargo policy
Accepted manuscripts are embargoed until they appear online at EOH-P-in-press. No information in accepted manuscripts can be communicated to the media prior to lifting of the embargo.

Authorship
All authors listed in the manuscript must meet the following criteria of contribution described by “Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals” (http://www.icmje.org/icmje-recommendations.pdf).

• Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the research or the acquisition and analysis of data
• Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content
• Final approval of the version to be published
• Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved

Each author is required to submit an authorship confirmation form at the time of submission.
Contributors who do not meet the criteria above should not be listed as authors. Guest or honorary authorship is not permitted.

ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID)
EOH-P supports the use of ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID), which is a unique and persistent identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher.
The submitting authors are required to provide an ORCID iD at the time of submission. Upon acceptance of a manuscript, the author’s iDs will be deposited to Crossref to enable authors to link their unique identify with their research work and displayed in the Journal’s website.

3. Ethical issues

The journal’s publication criteria are based on high ethical standards. Clinical research included in articles which reports on human subjects should follow the principles outlined in the Declaration of Helsinki, and that the research had been approved by the relevant institutional or national review board prior to the initiation of the study. If no approval from any review board was required, that must be explicitly stated in the manuscript. The members of the Japan Society of Occupational Health (JSOH) may apply to the ethical review committee of Japan Society for Occupational Health (JSOH) for internal review if the review board is not available at their institution prior to conducting the research.

Articles reporting on research on human subjects must obtain the informed consent from the participants. Any data or information such as patient names, initials, hospital patient identification codes (patient ID), specific dates, or any other information which may identify participants must not be presented anywhere in the manuscript including the figures, tables and videos.

Animal experiments are expected to be performed in accordance with Guidelines for Animal Experiments established at each institution.

4. Manuscript categories

The following types of contributions will be considered for publication.

Reviews: Review, evaluation or commentary of a number of research reports on a specific theme.

Originals: Articles with new findings and original research results, research methodologies, research materials and interpretations of the authors’ own or of other research results and articles of a similar nature.

Brief Reports: Articles with limited but original data and having the same format as originals.

Case Studies: Reports on cases of interest in the field of occupational health or environment, clinical experiences caused by occupational or environmental hazard cases concerning practical improvement in working conditions or environment.

Field Studies: Reports on investigation into the health status in workplaces or environmental issues with relevant data.

Good Practices: Reports on a practical and timely method or technique, well thought out in the occupational field, to improve occupational health practitioners’ activities.

Occupational Health and Safety in the World: Reports on occupational and environmental issues that have not been shed light on but may have serious impact on workers’ health and safety.

Opinion/Recommendation: Short articles conveying authors’ own opinions or comments on various aspects of occupational health. Opinion also includes Issues or topics encountered in occupational health practices and should be explored in future research. Scientific based recommendation can be published from scientific committees as articles under the heading of “Recommendation”.

Letters to the Editor: Letters to the Editor on material published in the EOH-P are welcome. When appropriate, the journal may invite replies.

Perspectives: More like a review but written from the author’s point of view. These focus on a specific field or discipline, discuss current advances or future directions, and may include original data as well as personal insights and opinions.

Commentary: Short, decisive observations and findings that generally relate to a contemporary issue, such as recent research findings, but can also include discussion on difficulties and possible solutions in a field of research.

5. Copyright

EOH-P is an Open Access article distributed under the Creative Commons License.
The following license are available:

• Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial (CC-BY-NC) license
• Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs (CC- BY-NC-ND) license

All Research Councils UK (RCUK) and Wellcome Trust funded authors will be directed to the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY).

Authors retain ownership of the copyright for their article. However, anyone may download, reuse, copy, reprint, distribute, or modify articles published in the EOH-P for not-for-profit purposes, if they cite the original authors and source properly. If anyone remix, transform, or build upon the material, the user must distribute their contributions under the same license. For for-profit or commercial use, please contact the author to obtain permission.

6. Manuscript format and style

Manuscripts should be prepared in the following manner. Submissions that do not conform to the instructions will be returned unread. The Editorial Office holds the right not to publish an article at any stage of the submission, review, and copyediting if the manuscript does not follow the required format and style.

Manuscripts should be written in English. Non-native English authors are requested to seek the assistance of an English-proficient colleague or commercial English editing services before submission of manuscripts to the journal. Manuscripts with poor readability will not be sent to the review process.

Manuscripts should be typed in 12-point type with margins of 2.5 centimeters on A4 (ca. 22×28 cm) paper. Double spacing should be used throughout, and the right margin should be unjustified.

All papers should be organized to include the following: a title page, abstract, text, acknowledgments, references, figure legends, tables and figures. Each of the elements should begin on a separate page.

Pages should be numbered consecutively, beginning with the abstract. Line numbers should be put in the left margin of each page of the text.

Title page. The title page should include the following: a concise and descriptive title, name of each author, departmental and institutional affiliation of each author, the telephone and fax numbers as well as the e-mail address of the corresponding author, type of contribution, running head (not more than 60 letters including spaces), the number of words in the abstract and the text and the number of tables and figures.

Abstract. For all submissions except Good Practice, Letters to the Editor, and Commentary, structured abstracts should not exceed 250 words and should normally be organized under the following headings: Objectives, Methods, Results, and Conclusions. However, abstracts for narrative reviews, Perspectives, and Opinion/Recommendation can be unstructured if appropriate.

Word count. Originals, Field Studies, Opinion/Recommendation, and Perspectives should be limited to 4,000 words, and Reviews to 6,000, excluding the abstract, acknowledgments, references, tables, and figure legends. Brief Reports, Good Practices, Case Studies, and Commentary should not exceed 3,000 words and should contain no more than two short tables or figures. Letters to the Editor must not exceed 600 words, with only one table or figure.

Format. Originals should generally use the following format: Introduction, Subjects (or Materials) and Methods, Results, and Discussion. Subheadings and paragraph titles should be used whenever possible. Good Practices should generally use the following format: Issue (or Background), Viewpoint on improvement, Implementation, Effect/Impact/Outcome, and Implication.

Keywords. For all submissions, give a list of 3 to 6 keywords in alphabetical order. The authors are recommended to refer to Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) selected from main headings listed in Medical Subject Headings in Index Medicus, published by the National Library of Medicine (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/MBrowser.html). Keywords will be placed after the abstract for Reviews, Originals, Brief Reports, Case Studies, Field Studies and Good Practice.

Tables and figures. Tables and figures should be of adequate quality to withstand reduction in size. Each table and figure should be submitted on a separate A4 sheet. Their locations in the text should be indicated in the right margin of the text. Only 6 or fewer tables and figures are permitted in total. Each table and figure should constitute a single unit of communications; that is, it should be completely informative in itself without reading the body of the text.

• Instructions for Tables
  – Formatting: Do not use vertical lines.
  – Fonts: Regular fonts only. Do not use bold fonts.
• Odds Ratio and Hazard Ratio
  – Confidence interval for the odds ratio and hazard ratio should be reported.
  – Give 2 significant digits for odds ratio.
• p-value
  – Include 3 digits after the decimal of precision.
  – Do not include the zero before the decimal point except for the values exceeding 1.0(e.g., p<.01).
  – The letter “p” must be in lowercase and italicized, and place a hyphen “-” between “p” and “value”. Example: p-value

Units and symbols. The following units and symbols should be used for quantities and measurements: km, m, cm, mm, μm, nm, Å; kg, g, mg, μg; l, ml, μl; The following abbreviations can be used after a slash (/): yr (year), mo (month), wk (week), h (hour), min (minute), s (sec), ms (millisecond), μs.

References. Please refer to the examples of references listed at the end of these instructions. References should be numbered according to the order in which they appear in the text and should be listed at the end of the text. For more information about this reference style, please see the AMA Manual of Style.
References should be limited to 40 in Originals, Opinion/Recommendation, and Perspectives. For Brief Reports, Case Studies, Field Studies, Good Practice, Occupational Health and Safety in the World, and Commentary, the number of references should not exceed 15. For Letters to the Editor, should not exceed 5 references. Please ensure that the references include the most current articles and information. Reference numbers should be indicated in the text with numbers followed by a closing parenthesis, e.g. ,…¹⁾. …^2,3), …^1-5).

6.13.

Supplementary material for a paper will be published. Supplementary materials should be submitted in separate files. Please select the “Supplementary Material (for publication)” from the pull-down menu on the manuscript submission system at the time of submission.

• Supplementary material may consist of large quantities of original data that relate to the paper, e.g., appendixes, additional tables and/or figures, etc.
• Legends must be brief, self-sufficient explanations of the supplementary files. Supplementary material is to be numbered and referred to as Supplementary Fig.1, Supplementary Table 1, etc.

After acceptance for publication, supplementary material will be published as received from the author.

Data Profile: Data profiles cover any dataset of use to practitioners as well as researchers in occupational health field. Each profile should provide sufficient detail to enable practitioners and researchers to understand the scope of the resource and how to access and make best use of the data. Please use links to provide more detailed information if necessary. Describe a data resource to which data access is either open via a website or for which the author(s) or their institution have the right to grant at least collaborative access via a straightforward and transparent application process (word counts 2000).

Video: EOH-P accepts video material to support and enhance authors’ occupational health practices or scientific research. Authors who have video files that they wish to submit with their article are encouraged to include links to these within the body of the article. This can be done in the same way as a figure or table by referring to the video content and noting in the body text where it should be placed. All submitted files should be properly labeled so that they directly relate to the video file’s content.
In order to ensure that your video or animation material is directly usable, please provide the file in one of our recommended file formats with a preferred maximum size of 50 MB per file,100 MB in total.

7. Charges

Article processing charge (APC) of 60,000 yen (80,000 yen for non-members of JSOH) will be charged upon acceptance of manuscript for publication in EOH-P.
We will waive or discount charges for corresponding authors covered by the Research4Life Initiative(“Group A” and “Group B” countries).
A society membership discount will be applied when either the Corresponding Author or the First Author is a member of the Japan Society for Occupational Health (JSOH) at the time of submission.

The APC must be paid via PayPal™ or bank transfer in Japanese yen (JPY). Instruction for the payment will be sent upon acceptance of the article for submission.
The payment is due within 14 days of acceptance of the article for publication. All manuscript will be withdrawn if the payment is not received by the due date.
The color figure(s) will appear in color free of charge to authors.

Publication of Letters to the Editor will cost 10,000 JPY per Letter not withstanding membership.

8. Submitting a manuscript

Manuscripts should be submitted online through the web site at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/eohp. Authors can suggest preferred/non-preferred reviewers for their manuscript, but the editors are not obliged to use/not to use author suggested reviewers. In the EOH-P editorial process, six field editors and their associate editors will handle submitted papers according to their relevant areas of expertise. Please choose 2 appropriate fields in the order you prefer, as this will help ensure a prompt and efficient editorial process. The editorial board may allocate papers to fields other than those chosen by the authors when appropriate, but authors should endeavor to select the appropriate fields. Selection of inappropriate fields will delay the editorial process.

Six fields and the areas they cover in the EOH-P

Toxicology
Toxicology in chemical substances including experimental and epidemiological studies, exposure assessment and biological monitoring in working conditions or environment.

Ergonomics
Musculoskeletal disorders, fatigue and other health risks related to workstation design and working conditions; physical environment and safety in the workplace.

Mental health/psychosocial factors
Factors associated with the mental health of workers; psychosocial factors at work and health outcomes.

Occupational health practice/Occupational health practitioner
Role and activities of occupational health practitioners; regulations related to occupational health practice.

Health promotion
Factors that contribute to many health and safety problems among workers, measures for protection and health promotion of the health of workers.

Epidemiology
Epidemiological studies, trends of health problems in workers, international surveys, studies utilizing risk factors beyond the workplace such as socioeconomic factors and specific epidemiological methodologies.

As described in 1. About the journal, EOH-P accepts reports on the development or usage of tools for OSH activities, exploratory research that has the potential for expansion, and methodology studies detailing new initiatives (i.e., study profiles) or adjustments useful for work practices in above mentioned fields.

9. Accepted manuscripts

Research articles accepted for publication in the EOH-P will appear initially as author-supplied unedited files online in the EOH-P-in-Press section on the J-STAGE website shortly after acceptance. The article will be citable using a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) code. The date the articles was included on the website will be considered the publication date. Any substantive changes at this stage will require an erratum to be published. Articles will be published in order of acceptance as journal space permits.

Copyediting
Accepted manuscripts will undergo copyediting. The authors of the accepted manuscript are asked to make appropriate changes requested by the Editorial Office. The authors will be asked to submit the corrected manuscript to the Editorial Office as a Microsoft Word file (s).

Page proofs will be made available once to the submitting author.

Offprints
Offprints can be ordered upon acceptance of your manuscript.
Accepted manuscripts can also be accessed from the journal’s page on the J-STAGE website free of charge. Authors can download the PDFS of their accepted articles and send then to colleagues for noncommercial use.

10. Conflict of Interest (COI)

Conflict of Interest and Sources of Funding Authors must state explicitly whether potential conflicts of interest (COI) exists or not. This includes, but not limited to, agreements for research support (including research funding and provision of equipment or materials), honoraria (such as lecture fees), consulting, employment, promotional fees, advisory role, stock ownership, patent/licensing fees and any other financial, institutional or personal relationships with biotechnology manufacturers, a pharmaceutical companies, or other commercial organizations that has any interest in the subject matter, materials, or process (es) discussed in the manuscript. Any possible COI related to the study presented in the manuscript must be disclosed in the title page, with the heading “Conflicts of Interest” by using the following examples for each author:

If the manuscript is accepted for publication, the disclosures will be published as they appear in this section. If there are no COIs, the authors should state “The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest” in the title page.

All sources of funding, from entities such as government or non-profit organizations, which are relevant to the study should be acknowledged in the title page with the heading “Sources of Funding”.

11. Editorial Office contact information

Questions regarding the instructions for authors should be addressed to the journal office via e-mail (sanei@letterpress.co.jp).

Examples of references

Authors are responsible for the accuracy of the references.
We recommend the use of a tool such as EndNote for reference management and formatting. The Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) Style is available in EndNote.
The examples follow the format of the Uniform Requirements of Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals.

Journal article
•  King VM, Armstrong DM, Apps R, Trott JR. Numerical aspects of pontine, lateral reticular, and inferior olivary projections to two paravermal cor­tical zones of the cat cerebellum. J Comp Neurol 1998; 390: 537-551.

Book

•  Voet D, Voet JG. Biochemistry. New York: John Wiley & Sons; 1990.
  Please note that journal title abbreviations should conform to the practices of Chemical Abstracts.

Internet document

•  American Cancer Society. Cancer Facts & Figures. http://www.cancer.org/downloads/STT/CAFF2003PWSecured.pdf. Published January 2003. Accessed March 3, 2003.