About the Journal

Human Biology and Public Health is the official journal of the Auxological Society.

Aims & Scope

The purpose of the journal is to bridge the gap between the medical/clinical perspectives of public health and the population-based perspectives of human biology. Public health today is built on four ‘pillars’: 1) health protection from environmental or biological threats, such as food poisoning or radiation, 2) health improvement - for example by helping people quit smoking or improving their living conditions, 3) healthcare - ensuring that health services are the most effective, most efficient and equally accessible, 4) academic public health – collect and assess evidence on which ‘pillars’ 1-3 are based. All four pillars relate to the prevention of disease, as defined by the medical/clinical professions. In contrast, human biology investigates the genetic, environmental, and cultural determinants of biological variability in living people. The focus is on how the human species evolved, how individual humans change over the lifespan (growth, maturation and development), how humans adapt to external stressors, and how human biology and culture interact to shape the wide range of normal variation in the biology and behavior of the human species. Both Public Health and Human Biology research contribute to risks for disease, but the perspective of human biology is cross-cultural, historical, and evolutionary.  This wide and deep biocultural perspective helps to avoid the limitations of focusing on only single societies in a limited time frame, for example of adult people of middle and upper socioeconomic status living in modern industrialized countries. 

Human Biology and Public Health will begin as a twice a year, blind peer-reviewed, international journal that publishes reports of original research, theoretical articles, timely reviews, and short notes in the field of human biology and public health. As the official journal of the Auxological Society, the Journal also publishes proceedings of research presented at its annual scientific meeting.

Human Biology and Public Health seeks scholarly manuscripts that address all aspects of the biology of living humans and  publishes basic, applied, and methodologically-oriented research, including growth, nutrition, aging, physical activity, fitness, ecology, and their medical/clinical perspectives.

Human Biology and Public Health is committed to prompt review, and priority publication is given to manuscripts with novel or timely findings, and to manuscripts of unusual interest.

Open Access Policy

This journal offers readers open access to all its contents in accordance with the assumption that free availability of research benefits the acquisition and transfer of knowledge (see Budapest open access initiative and Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in Science and Humanities). The journal is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Authors are at liberty to share their contributions, provided they give proper attribution to the original publication, without asking prior permission from the editors. More information about this license is available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Policy

Authors who publish with Human Biology and Public Health agree to the following terms:

Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.

Authors are obliged to obtain permission for the reproduction of previously published material of other copyright holders (e.g. figures or tables). Such permission is not necessary, if the reproduction is covered by a statutory citation right, if the material is in the public domain or when the authors themselves hold the copyright for the reproduced material.

Metadata incl. abstract of the articles/contributions are distributed under the conditions of the licence CC0 1.0 Universal.

Archiving Policy

All articles of the journal are additionally stored on the archive server of the German National Library (DNB) and are listed in the DNB catalogue. 

 

Technical Responsibility

Center für Digitale Systeme (CeDiS) der Freien Universität Berlin