Early this year, the entire back archive of OEM and its predecessor, the British Journal of Industrial Medicine, quietly became available to the world. Every research and education paper, every review, and every editorial, commentary and letter ever published in either journal from 1944 through 2008 is now available, free of charge, through OEM’s website at http://oem.bmj.com/contents-by-date.0.dtl

The scientific and medical advances documented in the journal’s 65 years are impressive, even in this age of proliferating publication. In this issue, we feature commentaries commemorating seminal papers from the British Journal of Industrial Medicine. Elsebeth Lynge1 describes how the methodology of the historical cohort study was laid out in a series of papers published by Hill, Doll and Case between 1948 and 1954.2^–7 To my knowledge, these are the first papers ever published on this design, which was groundbreaking 50 years ago, and they remain worth reading as models of clear statistical thinking. Stephen Rapport8 recalls equally innovative papers on methods for exposure assessment that were published in 1952 and 1953 by Wright, Roach, Oldham and Long, but whose significance, unfortunately, was not fully appreciated for another four decades.9^–13 In the third commentary, Anthony Newman Taylor14 chronicles the impact of three papers in the British Journal of Industrial Medicine that established definitive links between asbestos and cancer, which led ultimately to today’s strict limits on the use of asbestos.4 15 16 Interestingly, one of these was the same paper in which Doll illustrated the historical cohort design.4

Although much has changed since 1944, reading through the archive shows the extent to which the journal’s editors, like its authors, anticipated the directions in which the journal and the field it covers would evolve. An introductory editorial in volume 1, number 1 of the British Journal of Industrial Medicine, presumably written by the first editor, Donald Hunter, began by outlining the case for launching a new periodical in wartime.17 The development of great new industries with their accompanying hazards and the influx of “thousands of men and women and girls and boys” into industrial work for the first time, it explained, justified the allocation of scarce paper to print the journal, which it was hoped would be valuable to health “not only in factories but in mines, shipyards, docks, the transport services and in clerical and commercial organization”. That war ended more than 65 years ago, but the forces of economic growth have continued to propel the expansion of industry worldwide and the entry of new workers of both sexes and all ages into the labour force, and the journal’s content reflects that diversity of workers and workplaces.

The first editorial also expressed the hope that the journal would eventually extend its geographic coverage to be associated with industrial medicine in the British Dominions and the USA. That hope of expanding the journal’s geographic scope has clearly been surpassed: the current editor is from the USA, the deputy editor is Australian, and we receive papers from around the world. Currently, about 14% of contributions are from the UK, another 14% are from the USA; Canada, Australia and New Zealand contribute another 10% together, various countries of the European Union account for 21%, and the remainder come from every other continent.

In another paper in the first issue, Major Greenwood, undoubtedly one of the most progressive epidemiological thinkers of the era, pointed out the need for attention to the general environment, as well as to conditions in the workplace.18 Greenwood hoped that scientists of his time would be credited for recognising that “it is not only the working hours and the environment of work rooms that are considered the province of the industrial hygienist” (and perhaps, by extension, of the occupational physician and the epidemiologist).

The expanded purview that Greenwood advocated and the journal’s by then international perspective were made explicit with the change of title to Occupational and Environmental Medicine in 1994. In the first issue of the retitled journal, the incoming editor, Ann Cockroft, recalled 50 years of the British Journal of Industrial Medicine. She wrote that, while the journal’s reputation for scientific rigour in occupational medicine was established, it was time for a change and that the journal would seek to publish papers on environmental health and to encourage more contributions from developing countries.19 Fifteen years later we still hope to enhance the journal’s environmental content and to publish more high-quality papers from developing countries, although we have made progress on both fronts.

We will publish more commentaries highlighting key papers from the journal’s history in coming issues. In addition, we encourage readers to review the journal’s online archives themselves and to send us letters nominating the papers from past years of the British Journal of Industrial Medicine and OEM they think have been most important. We will review all of the letters we receive and publish as many as possible online and in the print journal.