A Platform of People Who are Working for Workers' Health

Safety and Health at Work (SHAW) was established on September 1, 2010, by the Occupational Safety and Health Research Institute of Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency to give a new opportunity to scientists, administrators, and other relevant professionals who are working for workers' health. The journal publishes approximately 65 articles quarterly in a year. As of 2019, SHAW is indexed in various international databases: Scientific Citation Index Expanded and Social Science Citation Index. SHAW was indexed first in KoreaMED and PubMed Central in 2012, Scopus in 2013, and Emerging SCI in 2016.

According to the International Labour Organization, global economically active population was 3.3 billion in 2018 [1]. As long as people engage in working, they might be exposed to any kind of occupational risk during their work life. The International Labour Organization estimates that 340 million workers are injured at work, and 160 million workers suffered from work-related diseases in a year. Economical losses by occupational risks are estimated to approximately 4% of gross national products. The Comparative Risk Assessment project of the World Health Organization estimated that the occupational risk factors attributed to 62 million disability-adjusted life years and caused 852,000 deaths worldwide in 2010 [2]. Global estimates of occupational fatalities were almost 320,000 by accidents and 2.02 million by diseases in 2012 [3].

Occupational injuries and diseases are more serious in economically developing countries because they have problems caused by old classical occupational hazards, on top of newly emerging issues, which are predominant in developed countries. In Korea, 89,848 cases of newly developed occupational injuries and diseases were compensated in 2017, including 8,190 work-related diseases and 1,957 fatalities [4]. The estimated economic loss was 22 trillion Korean Won, which was 1.46% of the gross domestic product. Compared with most European countries, the injury rate of Korea was lower at 0.49%, while the accident fatality rate was higher at 5.22 deaths per 100,000 workers. However, the number of injured workers was underestimated as there might have been underreporting of such injury cases, while almost all fatalities were reported. According to the Working Condition Survey performed in 2017, workers who have experienced symptoms caused by work were approximately 4.9%, which was similar to the result of the European Working Condition Survey [5].

The Korean economy has rapidly grown during the last five decades; however, the quality of occupational safety and health fails to follow the level of the economy. At that reason, Korea has experienced the both problems faced in developed countries and countries under developing. Many research studies on improving working condition and protecting workers' health have been performed. Scientists have reported many interesting cases, studies, and best practices, which might be informative to the rest of the world. However, these experiences were not recognized or delivered in most countries because they were not available in English. Many articles also have not been accepted by international journals because of unskilled writing and inappropriate expression, although they might contain good informative research results to the world. This phenomenon still occurs in many countries under developing.

At the editorial of the first issue of SHAW in 2010, I wrote that “The Safety and Health at Work (SHAW), new international journal, will try to bring scientific papers, which may not be well polished but contain much new information on occupational safety and health, especially from developing countries. The Editorial board will do their best to help authors to improve the quality of submitted manuscripts rather than simply rejecting them with the reason of low quality in writing. SHAW hopes to provide scientists a venue for exchanging new information and knowledge. SHAW will bring researches on safety and health together while most international journals publish them separately. It also intends to publish papers for research on policies and social science as well as research on natural science in occupational safety and health. Of course, SHAW is an open access journal to provide its information to all relevant professionals in the world. All submission processes are being done by online to be easily accessible from anywhere and from anyone.”

Since the first issue in 2010, SHAW is under way to reach its goal, which brings knowledge and experience from safety and health, injuries and diseases, engineering and medicine, prevention and rehabilitation, and developed and developing countries. It published articles from different sectors, geographic regions and professionals but having the same purpose of protecting and improving workers' health. There were 42 submitted manuscripts in 2010 but 421 in 2018. Most submitted ones were well designed and written, however, due to limited spaces, 416 articles from 45 countries of 6 continents could be published by the end of 2018. Countries under developing contributed to 44% of published articles and 26% of first authors were from those countries. Three quarters of published articles were the original research and followed by 13 % of reviews. Topics related to safety were 18.3%, followed by 18.0% of policies and management, 14.7% of psychology, 13% of medicine, 11.8% of hygiene, 10.8% of ergonomics, 5.8% of toxicology, 5.0% of epidemiology, and 2.6% of compensation and rehabilitation. CiteScore calculated by Scopus was 1.56 in 2018, and the impact factor by the Institute for Scientific Information may be announced in this year.

SHAW has an editorial policy to reach its goal. Submitted manuscripts are given the priority in publishing when they are (1) more creative work which is not a similar version of published ones, (2) more diverse work which represents a unique situation in the country or regional level, (3) more comprehensive work which can accommodate issues of health and safety, and (4) more human-oriented work which targets to save workers' lives and quality of life.

SHAW will continue its mission on “bringing together” on the platform to share scientists' idea in multidirection for improving workers health.

Appendix A. Supplementary data

The following is the Supplementary data to this article: