Collection on score sheets,severity assessment and humane end points: Invitation to submit

Laboratory Animals publishes original papers and reviews on the care and use of animals in biomedical research with the aim of promoting the welfare of laboratory animals. An important tool for evaluating and promoting animal welfare in experiments is severity monitoring. EU Directive 2010/63/EU introduced requirements for classifying the severity of procedures, not only for project authorisation but also for reporting actual severity experienced by the individual animals.¹

Score sheets standardise and formalise severity assessment. This makes it possible to record the effect of scientific procedures on animals, and therefore to inform decisions on remedial measures or experiment termination. Additionally, well-defined humane end points reduce suffering and minimise unnecessary deaths of animals. Data collected in score sheets can direct the development of refinements, for example optimised analgesic protocols, and facilitate their effective implementation, thereby improving the welfare of animals used in research.²

As part of the implementation of EU Directive 2010/63/EU, extensive efforts are being made to improve methods for severity assessment (see Special Issue “Severity assessment in animal-based research” Laboratory Animals 2020; 54(1); https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/lana/54/1). However, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to scoring severity and animal welfare, and practical, evidence-based, established and available score sheets are absent for many experimental procedures. Further development is therefore essential to increase the accuracy, specificity and effectiveness of scoring and grading systems for severity and animal welfare.

As a contribution to this process, Laboratory Animals aims to collate recently published articles on the development and evaluation of severity assessment methods, along with example score sheets from different scientific fields (https://journals.sagepub.com/page/lan/collections/score-sheets). We hope that this collection will encourage further research in this field, improving sharing of the knowledge gained from their use and subsequent improvements in laboratory animal welfare.

We invite scientists to submit original papers on severity assessment methods and humane end-point criteria, reviews on the use and suitability of current assessment methods and scoring schemes and short reports on example score sheets to Laboratory Animals.