The MAK Collection for Occupational Health and Safety
The MAK Collection for Occupational Health and Safety is issued as a journal since 2016. Since 2020, it is published as a quarterly issued journal with articles in English and German by German Medical Science (GMS) on the publishing platform PUBLISSO.
Further information on German Medical Science (GMS) can be found here:
https://www.egms.de/en/imprint.htm
The Permanent Senate Commission for the Investigation of Health Hazards of Chemical Compounds in the Work Area (Ständige Senatskommission zur Prüfung gesundheitsschädlicher Arbeitsstoffe) publishes the results of its activities in the four article categories “MAK Value Documentations”, “Assessment Values in Biological Material”, “Air Monitoring Methods” and “Biomonitoring Methods”.
Publications of the documentations for the MAK and BAT values and the corresponding analytical methods reach back to 1972. Initially, publications in German language of documentations for MAK values appeared in the form of a loose-leaf collection, and in subsequent years also for BAT values and analytical methods. The basic loose-leaf collection was expanded and updated by supplementary deliveries. Obsolete contents were replaced by newly delivered sheets and marked as “invalid” in the digitised version (PDF). From 1985 to 2015, the documentations of the MAK and BAT values and those on the analytical methods were additionally published in English in the form of a book series with individual parts on each of the four categories; they were published only online from the year 2016 onwards. In 2012, the majority of the publications in German and English language that had appeared by then were also made available online. From 2012 up to and including 2018, the German-language publications continued to appear both in printed form as supplementary issues for the loose-leaf collection and online.
The Commission, with the support of additional experts (Guests of the Commission) and the Scientific Secretariat, summarizes all the available toxicological information on a substance, its mechanisms of action, and the evaluations relevant to the workplace exposure. These form the basis for suggestions for health-based limit values, classifications and other notations. In addition, for certain substances, analytical methods are developed and continually updated, to reliably monitor the limit values.
Aims and Scope
For more than sixty-five years the MAK Commission as the oldest Senate Commission of the DFG advocates for healthy and safe workplaces and develops the scientific basis for threshold setting in the area of chemicals and substances with its publications. With the timely publication of the recommendations for the threshold setting and the description of the analytical methods in the journal The MAK Collection for Occupational Health and Safety the scientific information are edited in a comprehensible manner as well as made freely available to scientists, policymakers and the interested public. Therefore, not only transparency and reproducibility are ensured but also key stimuli in the research fields of toxicology and prevention are provided.
The topics and priorities for the selection of the about 85 annually published articles in total are based solely on scientific findings, regardless of political or economic interests. Within the selection process, suggestions from practice, from the Federal Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs in Germany as well as related discussions within EU bodies are taken into account. New challenges for occupational safety due to the use or occurrence of new substances and mixtures of substances, but also growing knowledge and publications of new studies on known substances with ongoing workplace exposure are relevant in prioritising and topic selection.
