The journal published its first volume in 1980, in response to a second American "public health revolution". The preface of the first volume noted the shift towards chronic health conditions like cancer and heart disease. It also noted the rising cost of diagnosing and treating disease in the US, which had doubled from 1950 to 1975. The first editor was
Lester Breslow. The five subtopics in volume 15 (1994) were epidemiology and biostatistics, public health practice, behavioral aspects of health, health services, and environmental and occupational health. In April 2017, Annual Reviews made the
Annual Review of Public Health open access as part of a grant from the
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. By May 2019, usage of the journal had increased eight-fold relative to 2016 to about 200,000 downloads monthly. For comparison, the titles for clinical psychology and medicine that maintained gated access showed no change in usage. Additionally, the audience for the journal increased from 1,100 institutions in 57 countries (2016) to 7,220 institutions in 137 countries (2018). Based on this success, Annual Reviews created the
Subscribe to Open (S2O) publishing model to convert some of its other journals from gated to open access on a year-to-year basis. ==Editorial processes==