I am pleased to announce the launch of Environmental Health Insights—a new peer reviewed open access journal published by Libertas Academica. Environmental Health Insights examines how environmental factors affect the health of individuals and societies. Pollution, working and living conditions, environmental change and regional variation in resources and their utilization are of increasing global concern today. This includes occupational medicine, toxicology, waste management and health geography. Focusing on efficient prevention and control rather than treatment of illness, the discipline of environmental health seeks to limit hazards and associated risks to protect public health, occupational health and our environment.

Environmental health is both multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary, applying and integrating the scientific concepts of biology, ecology, chemistry and physics with sociology, psychology, management and many other disciplines. The discipline of environmental health is solution oriented and therefore empowering to those seeking to manage their own health and to protect our environment. Environmental Health Insights allows the integration of different fields in order to gain a clearer view of how environmental circumstances affect health and what can be done about it.

There continues to be wide academic and public interest in environmental health topics, and this journal will be competing head-on with a number of existing subscription-based journals. However, there is clearly a niche for the new journal. This is because all journal articles will be accessible without any access boundaries to all internet users throughout the world. This accessibility allows academicians and the public access to information about how their health is related to their environment. This freedom is coupled with rigorous, fair and prompt standards of peer review.

Environmental Health Insights is published exclusively online. Articles will follow a consistent format so that the visual impact will be high and equal to that of the best hard-copy publications. In contrast to paper-based journals, however, the electronic format allows the full use of digital technologies and permits the inclusion of large data sets, from field and laboratory studies, links to other web pages, animations, slide shows, video clips and unlimited colour, all at no additional charge. Open access means that all articles are freely available to all, worldwide, and at no cost to the reader. Authors retain copyright of their work and can grant anyone the right to reproduce and disseminate it, provided that it is correctly cited and no errors are introduced, under the Creative Commons CC-BY licence.

In hard-copy journals, the costs of publication are met by subscriptions, paid by the reader. In Environmental Health Insights, as in other open access journals, these costs are borne by the author in the form of a publication processing fee. Many grant-awarding bodies recognise the value of open access publishing by allowing their funds to be used for PPFs. Fee waivers and discounts are available on a case-by-case basis, and we shall make every effort to ensure that lack of funds does not impede the overall objective of publishing the best science, irrespective of authorship or country of origin.

I do not foresee that open access, online journals will totally replace the traditional print format in the immediate future, although this may be an increasing trend with time. I am certain, however, that the benefits of online publication, and the extra opportunities that digital technologies give to authors, will be increasingly recognised. Open access is of huge benefit to the researchers working in institutions around the world where institutional libraries are unable to afford subscription fees for a full range of journals.

I expect that Environmental Health Insights will attract manuscripts of the highest quality which are of the greatest possible benefit to readers. Peer review is undertaken by at least two leading experts in the area of the manuscript.

For more information, please refer to the ‘About This Journal’ section of the website.