Dear colleagues,

EBSA is guest-editing a special issue of Applied Biosafety — "Biorisk Management: Global Approaches and Practices" — and I want it filled with EBSA voices. Marcel van Bergen and I are guest-editing it for EBSA, and the submission window is open now, with a deadline of 1 March 2027.

Here is what I most want you to hear: everyone reading this has a paper in them. Not everyone believes that, so let me be blunt about who I'm writing to.

If you have never written for a journal — if you think papers are for the academics and the researchers and not for you — you are exactly the person we want to hear from. The work you do every day is applied biosafety: the near-miss you handled well, the training that finally landed, the awkward facility problem you solved, the way you made a standard work in a setting it was never written for. The call welcomes precisely this kind of thing — managing biorisk in the field and in low-resource settings, laboratory design and commissioning, the professional skills our work depends on, the role of networks in shaping practice. That is the knowledge this field runs on, and most of it never gets written down. Here is your chance to change that.

And it does not have to be a full research article. The special issue welcomes Original Articles, Reviews, Editorials and Commentaries, and Letters to the Editor. A sharp, honest piece of a few pages about something you know well is genuinely welcome — and there is no charge to publish unless you choose immediate open access.

Two practical points worth knowing. First, you won't have to wait for the printed issue to have a published paper: accepted articles go online ahead of the print release, so your work is out and citable as soon as it clears review. Second, when you submit, select "Special Issue with the European Biosafety Association" as the manuscript type.

You do not need a finished manuscript to start. If you have a rough idea — even a single paragraph — and you're not sure it's worth pursuing, Marcel or I are happy to talk it through informally. That offer is real; I would far rather have ten of you take me up on it than none. For formal pre-submission questions and anything to do with the process itself, the journal's Associate Editors are your point of contact: Sumit Ghosh (sumit.ghosh@nationwidechildrens.org) and Scott Patlovich (scott.j.patlovich@uth.tmc.edu).

The deadline is 1 March 2027. That sounds far off; it is not, once you allow for drafting and review. Please don't leave it until the winter.

Full details and submission: https://journals.sagepub.com/page/apb/callforpapers?pbEditor=true

With warm regards,

Pat