Scientific excellence

As a publicly funded agency, ECDC makes sure that its scientific output is freely available, both on its website and in scientific journals.

ECDC’s open access and authorship policies, published for the first time in 2017, have been revised. The Centre has renewed its commitment to ensuring that work it generates is disseminated and easily accessible to all EU citizens, and that contributions to ECDC’s work are acknowledged fairly, adhering to principles of transparency and equitability. In 2022, 98% of ECDC publications in peer-reviewed journals were open access.

Jointly with WHO’s Regional Office for Europe, ECDC published enhanced surveillance reports for tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and anti-microbial resistance (AMR). Annual epidemiological reports were published for chlamydia infection, hepatitis B and C, lymphogranuloma venereum, syphilis and congenital syphilis, tuberculosis, AMR, antimicrobial consumption and Clostridioides (Clostridium) infections. For hepatitis, ECDC worked to improve the data for surveillance and monitoring by implementing several projects (e.g. conducting sero-prevalence surveys).

In addition, ECDC published its assessment of the health burden of infections with antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the EU/EEA, with an update for 2016−2020.

In 2022, significant strides were made to address issues relating to the information architecture of ECDC’s website – a key channel for the dissemination of the Agency’s knowledge and scientific outputs to external audiences. The website’s browsing experience was enhanced and content re-categorised and relabelled to align it with the core needs of users. New desktop and mobile-responsive navigation features were also designed and deployed,

A machine translation feature was deployed on ECDC, EAAD (European Antibiotics Awareness Day) and ESCAIDE (European Scientific Conference on Applied Infectious Disease Epidemiology) websites, allowing visitors to translate pages into one the 24 official EU languages.

To support knowledge exchange between Member States, a new Repository of Member State Policy and Practice Resources has been designed, populated and released. The repository will act as a gateway to quality-assured policy and practice resources that have been produced or published by national public health institutes, national ministries of health, and recognised and respected learned societies or academies. The aim of the repository is to facilitate and improve the sharing of such resources and expertise – thereby improving collaboration across Member States and potentially reducing their need to invest in undertaking similar scientific work. The repository is at the pilot stage and the topic being piloted is Substances of Human Origin (SoHO) biovigilance guides that have been issued across the Member States, in line with the prominence given to SoHO under ECDC’s new mandate.

In 2022 the scientific journal Eurosurveillance continued to offer public health experts/scientists and policy makers highquality, open-access information and data relevant for timely public health action. Last year it received its highest ever impact factor, with a figure of 21 (InCites Journal Citation Reports, Clarivate analytics, 2022) and now ranks fifth among 95 journals in the ‘Infectious Diseases’ category.

While COVID-19 pandemic-related articles continued to prevail among submissions and published articles, the year was also marked by other important public health events. These were reflected in rapid communications providing timely evidence for public health decision-making. Eurosurveillance featured several very early - or even first - accounts of worrisome signals, such as a Salmonella outbreak linked to chocolate products, the occurrence of hepatitis of unknown aetiology in children and the emergence of mpox outside of previously endemic areas.

Year 2022 was marked for Eurosurveillance by signing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) publishers’ compact, which strengthens, the journal in its efforts to highlight and actively promote contributions and initiatives supporting the health-related SDG Goal 3.

Once again, in 2022 ESCAIDE brought together professionals from the EU/EEA and around the world to share scientific knowledge and experience in infectious disease epidemiology, public health microbiology and related scientific fields. For the first time, it was held as a hybrid event with over 600 participants gathering on-site in Stockholm after two virtual conferences due to the COVID-19 pandemic. An additional 2 500 participants joined online. The conference received overwhelmingly positive feedback – 94% of those responding to the feedback survey indicated they were ‘extremely’ or ‘very much’ satisfied with the event. Respondents commented that it was an engaging and interactive conference with high-quality speakers and relevant discussions.