BJPsych International: new name, new strategic focus

date

2015-2-01

With this issue of our journal we are beginning a new chapter in facilitating communication between psychiatrists throughout the world. International Psychiatry was established in 2003, as the Bulletin of the Board of International Affairs of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. It continues to be provided free of charge, both in paper and online, thanks to the generosity of the members of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Our potential readership is enormous: over 15 000 members of the College receive the print edition regularly, and all issues can be downloaded from the College website. We need to address both the clinical interests and the needs of this diverse readership, and in so doing we will be redirecting the focus of the journal over the next few months and years. Publication of articles in the journal will remain cost free to contributors and rigorous refereeing will be sustained.

The time has come to review our strategic aims. Over the past decade, there has been a gradual evolution in content. We have focused increasingly on issues that have practical application in countries that do not have the resources to be adequately supporting psychiatric services.

First, we published accounts of the infrastructure of psychiatry provided worldwide in ‘Country Profiles’, a series that began with our first issue and emphasised diversity in mental health policies. We will continue with this policy and we have added an important section on international aspects of ‘Mental Health Law’, which is curated by George Ikkos, Deputy Editor.

Second, since the very first issue, we have reviewed diverse ‘Themes’, with a brief editorial and three papers that address the same topic from different perspectives. We intend to continue to address themes that have real practical relevance to supporting patients, with a particular, but not exclusive, focus on the needs of low- and middle-income countries as well as the mental health needs of the poor and socially excluded in high-income countries. Contributors who can provide examples of innovative practice, which could be emulated elsewhere at minimal cost, are especially welcome, as are papers on public mental health. Most articles in this thematic section are commissioned.

We receive a regular stream of uncommissioned articles, including some that concern original research findings. In future, we will not be publishing research articles of this type. The journal’s identity will be focused on practical issues, rather than theory or scientific studies that have no immediate relevance to the delivery of clinical services. We will pass such submissions on to the British Journal of Psychiatry’s new online sister journal, BJPsych Open, for consideration for publication there. We will continue to accept uncommissioned ‘Special Papers’, on subject matter that does not necessarily fit within a theme, but which is consonant with our aims.

There was a pressing need to address our limited online presence, and we have done so principally in the form of a blog. As we will no longer be publishing a Correspondence column, we will arrange for submitted comments about published articles, and also other relevant material, to be placed in the blogosphere, at http://www.BJPsychInternationalblog.org. A new member of the Editorial Board, David Jimenez, will be managing it, along with a social media presence with the journal’s new Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/BJPsychInternational) as well as a Twitter account (https://twitter.com/BJPsychInt;@BJPsychInt). We will also be changing the face of ‘News and Notes’. In a journal that is published quarterly, it was inevitable that most news was out of date by the time it appeared in print. Accordingly, a change of focus was needed. Eleni Palazidou will be managing the new commentary section of the journal, ‘Pandora’s Box’, which will take as its theme important developments in psychiatric practice over the previous few months that have direct clinical relevance to the non-specialist.

Finally, we have reviewed membership of the Editorial Board. We are keen for Editors to be active ambassadors for the journal, and we have consulted with members over the past few months about their roles. We have assigned specific tasks to many members of the revised Board, who will, we hope and anticipate, be actively eliciting contributions to the journal from colleagues in their region of the world. An important innovation is the appointment of new regional Associate Editors, who will help ensure the increasing local importance of the journal to psychiatrists worldwide. We have a new Associate Editor, Daniel Maughan, with responsibility for ‘Psychiatry and Sustainability’, a subject that is of increasing importance to all psychiatrists.

We trust the changes we have introduced, in the relaunched and renamed BJPsych International, will be welcomed by our readership. We look forward to hearing your comments.

Copyright Notice

Articles published from BJPsych Bulletin are open-access, published under the terms of creative commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

The Authors own the copyrights to the individual articles.