A New Venue for the Director’s Perspective

Two years ago this month I began writing this column for EHP. As the new NIEHS director, my goal for this column was to maximize communication with the environmental health sciences community about my vision, goals, and strategy for the institute, as well as convey information and opinion on topics I felt were important to the field. Although it seemed to me at the time that my use of EHP as a forum was a natural and reasonable activity given the journal's leadership and readership in environmental health sciences, time and experience have led me to a new recognition that this might be viewed as undue editorial influence over the jour-nal's content. I am fully committed to ensuring the scientific credibility of EHP, for which editorial independence is vital, and thus have decided to remove the Director's Perspective column from the journal and relocate it to a more appropriate venue on the NIEHS website. EHP 's relationship with the NIEHS has always been somewhat unique. Although many government-supported publications and even scientific journals exist, few have been supported directly by the NIH. EHP was begun as an NIEHS-supported journal in 1972 to fill a much-needed gap in scientific publishing in the fledgling field of environmental health sciences. And in fact, it has been the continued strong support of the NIEHS and the outstanding work of a relatively small group of highly dedicated individuals that have allowed the journal to evolve into the preeminent environmental sciences journal in the world. The journal was established with the tacit understanding that the editorial guidance of EHP would have to function independently in substance for the journal to succeed and serve its purpose, and safeguards including an outside, independent editorial board and appropriate scientific peer-review policies—and with later expansion, expert and outside review of news content and a stringent competing financial interest policy—were put into place, and continue to guide the journal's practices today. But the scientific climate and public concerns about real and perceived conflicts of interest have changed over the past 35 years. Whereas in the past these safeguards, along with the personal integrity of the editorial leadership, may have been enough to convey the integrity of the journal, in today's world more is expected. Today, it is not necessarily sufficient for a publication to be true in substance; it must also be true in appearance. In point of fact, EHP has …