  Episodic accretion plays an important role in the evolution of young stars.
Although it has been under investigation for a long time, the origin of such
episodic accretion events is not yet understood. We investigate the dust and
gas emission of a sample of young outbursting sources in the infrared to get a
better understanding of their properties and circumstellar material, and we use
the results in a further work to model the objects. We used Herschel data, from
our PI program of 12 objects and complemented with archival observations to
obtain the spectral energy distributions (SEDs) and spectra of our targets. We
report here the main characteristics of our sample, focussing on the SED
properties and on the gas emission lines detected in the PACS and SPIRE
spectra. The SEDs of our sample show the diversity of the outbursting sources,
with several targets showing strong emission in the far-infrared from the
embedded objects. Most of our targets reside in a complex environment, which we
discuss in detail. We detected several atomic and molecular lines, in
particular rotational CO emission from several transitions from J=38-37 to
J=4-3. We constructed rotational diagrams for the CO lines, and derived in
three domains of assumed local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE) temperatures and
column densities, ranging mainly between 0-100 K and 400-500K. We confirm
correlation in our sample between intense CO $J=16-15$ emission and the column
density of the warm domain of CO, N(warm). We notice a strong increase in
luminosity of HH 381 IRS and a weaker increase for PP 13 S, which shows the
beginning of an outburst.
