While EEF is formally a ‘Region’ of the International Epidemiological Association (IEA), it also has a role in pooling the interests of many national epidemiological societies in Europe. EEF’s most visible activity is coordination of annual conferences, hosted in turn by national societies and held in the two years between IEA triennial congresses. Conferences have greater impact and ‘permanence’ when proceedings including abstracts are published – in indexed and citable journals. While the proceedings of most EEF conferences have been published as supplements of the national journals of the societies hosting the conference, EJE has stepped in on several occasions when either there was no national journal or the national journal was unwilling to publish an English language supplement.
A new, beneficial agreement has been reached between the IEA-European Epidemiological Federation (EEF) and Springer, the leading, international publisher in the scientific, technical and medical fields and publisher of the European Journal of Epidemiology (EJE). The agreement brings several mutual benefits. For many years the EJE has supported the EEF by publishing the abstracts of the EEF’s European conferences at no cost to the EEF. From now on, where the national organizing society journals decline to publish the abstracts, the EEF will offer the EJE the right to publish them. The European conferences will be advertised on both a special page of the journal and online. The EJE will have the option to make an announcement in the EEF’s website regarding, for example, a new series of articles, the impact factor, and signing up to ToC Alerts/RSS Feeds. The EEF will allow the EJE the option of distributing a copy of the journal at the EEF’s meetings. Springer shall offer all EEF members a year-round 25 % 33 discount on all purchases from Springer’s book catalogue.
Springer advised an interest in developing an EEF/Springer book series in epidemiology to serve the EEF members and as broad an epidemiological community as possible. The EEF is willing to pursue such a project which could contribute, hopefully, to filling a gap in those European countries where epidemiology is less developed, and in general give to European epidemiology an enlarged space and audience.