It is my great pleasure to announce imminent launch of a new, high quality open-access, ‘Radiation and Health’ specialty of the Frontiers in Public Health, publishing research on the effects of exposures to radiation on human health and studies on the development of risk communication and regulatory policies to protect human population.

The specialty ‘Radiation and Health’ will be published as a part of the Swiss open access journal ‘Frontiers in Public Health’. The scope of the specialty will be broad and will cover all radiation types and all types of research studies. It will be a very comprehensive approach to health policy research and publication of it.

An important task of Chief Editor of specialty ‘Radiation and Health‘ in the Frontiers in Public Health is to appoint a top class and enthusiastic Associate Editorial Board of 15-25 editors to represent all the facets of specialty. These are leading scientists that will oversee the review of manuscripts.

As per requirements of Frontiers publisher, Associate Editors need to be researchers with a proven track record. They are generally Associate Professors or more senior.

After appointments, Associate Editors are to:

• submit an inaugural article to set the standard for your specialty within 4 months from their appointment; inaugural articles incur no publishing fees

• appoint 10-20 Review Editors that will form Review Editorial Board of around 200-300 scientists, who will serve as referees for the manuscripts

Here you find more information about “The Frontiers publishing paradigm“.

The mission statement describing in more detail specialty ‘Radiation and Health’ has been just published:

Radiation, whether ionizing or non-ionizing and whether naturally occurring or emitted by mam-made devices, is omnipresent in human environment and impacts on human life and health.

Specialty of ‘Radiation and Health’ is aimed at the scientific community and decision makers interested in broadly understood area of radiation effects on human health and in development of health policies designed to alleviate risks and to mitigate negative effects of exposures to radiation.

‘Radiation and Health’ will publish all pertinent scientific evidence that can be used in developing sound health policies. It will publish studies dealing with risk evaluation and risk communication. It will publish studies that form the scientific basis for policy decisions and risk evaluation and communication by providing scientific evidence of the impact of radiation on human physiology. Such studies, providing information about the biological mechanisms underlying and governing the health effects of radiation, are of paramount importance because they provide scientific justification for any risk control and policy decisions.

‘Radiation and Health’ specialty will publish research:

• on developing policies to mitigate radiation-related health risks

• on risk estimation of radiation exposures for both, individual users and for human population

• on developing new approaches of risk communication, about dangers of radiation exposures, that will be science based and will avoid triggering of unfounded scare

• on impact on both physiological and psychological aspects of human health examined in whole population by using epidemiological approach

• examining effects of radiation exposures on human physiology by biomedical approaches

• animal radiation toxicology studies examining acute and chronic exposures to radiation that are primarily designed to assist in estimation of human health risk

• in vitro laboratory studies examining biophysical and biochemical mechanisms of the physiological effects of radiation exposures (in vivo and ex vivo) on human tissues and cells

• ‘omics’ studies that examine globally effects of radiation on humans and animals using high-throughput methods of transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics; the ‘omics’ approach will help to discover signaling pathways and molecules targeted by radiation exposures and to develop new and more precise hypotheses about known and yet undiscovered physiological effects of radiation

Specialty ‘Radiation and Health‘ will have ‘comprehensive approach to health policy’, where not only manuscripts dealing directly with policy issues, risk estimation and information for the general public but also manuscripts, with large data sets to support policy decisions, will be published in the same specialty site.

I will be soon sending inquiries and invitations concerning appointments as Associate Editors for ‘Radiation and Health‘ of Frontiers in Public Health.

If you would like to actively contribute to this new scientific endeavor and if you would like to be considered for the appointment as Associate Editor for the ‘Radiation and Health‘ of Frontiers in Public Health, please, contact me at the Frontiers website, or via University of Helsinki e-mail: dariusz.leszczynski@helsinki.fi

It is a new and very exciting opportunity for me and for all researchers, decision makers and journalists involved in the issues of radiation effects on human health. By the proposed comprehensive approach to public health policy in ‘Radiation and Health’ it will be possible to gather in one site all information necessary for the tasks of developing health policies, risk estimates and public information procedures as well as science used to justify and back up all the above tasks.