The European Journal of Endocrinology was established in 1948 as Acta Endocrinologica by a group of Scandinavian endocrinologists. The founding editor-in-chief was Axel Westman. The journal was originally sponsored by the national endocrine societies of Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. Over its first four years the journal increased its publication frequency from four issues per year to nine issues, and has been published monthly since 1952. The editors-in-chief between 1948 and 1994 were Professor Axel Westman, Dr Christian Hamburger, Dr Jörgen Starup and Dr Christian Binder. Albert G Burger was the first editor-in-chief under the new name. Due to the growing international reputation of Acta Endocrinologica, in 1993 the journal was named as an official journal of the European Federation of Endocrine Societies. This change represented a will to broaden the horizons of the publication to the rest of Europe and further afield. As part of this shift, the journal changed its name to the European Journal of Endocrinology in 1994 and began selecting editorial board members from outside Scandinavia. Having had a broad scope covering both basic and clinical endocrine research since its foundation in 1948, in 2008 the European Journal of Endocrinology’s editorial board announced that it would no longer publish basic research but focus on translational and clinical endocrinology. This decision was made to establish the European Journal of Endocrinology as the clinical and translational journal of the European Society of Endocrinology, complementing the Society’s other official journals.
Online access
The European Journal of Endocrinology was first published online in July 1997 in PDF format. From January 2005, the online offering was extended to include the HTMLfull text version of articles and separate figures. All peer-reviewed editorial and review content is free to access from publication. Research articles are under access control for the first 12 months before being made available to the public. During the first 12 months the content is accessible for those at subscribing institutions and members of the European Society of Endocrinology. The journal automatically deposits articles to PubMed Central on behalf of authors who are funded by the National Institutes of Health, for release 12 months from publication, enabling authors to comply with the NIH Public Access Policy. The European Journal of Endocrinology is a hybrid open access journal, offering a ‘gold’ open access option whereby authors can pay an article publishing charge upon acceptance to have their article made freely available online immediately upon publication. These articles are automatically deposited into PubMed Central. All journal content is included in the World Health Organization’s HINARI scheme, which offers free or reduced-price access for institutions in certain developing countries to health-related research. The full archive of published content, including Acta Endocrinologica articles from June 1948 to December 1993 and European Journal of Endocrinology articles from January 1994 to June 1997, is available to purchase by institutions as part of the European Society of Endocrinology Archive.
Abstracting and indexing
The European Journal of Endocrinology is indexed in: According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2016 impact factor of 4.101.
