European Journal of Psychotraumatology

Welcome to the European Journal of Psychotraumatology!

The European Journal of Psychotraumatology (EJPT) is a new peer-reviewed Open Access journal and the official organ of the European Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ESTSS). It aims to serve the needs of both researchers and clinicians in the field of traumatic stress. EJPT is in line with ESTSS's mission to advance and disseminate scientific knowledge about traumatic stress within Europe and internationally, and will publish original research papers as well as papers on evidence-based clinical practice.

I am honoured to take on the position as Editor-in-Chief of EJPT. However, I could not have done this without the support of an excellent editorial team who will not only guarantee the scientific quality of the submitted articles but also help me develop EJPT to become a key resource for researchers and clinicians alike. The Associate Editors—each one of them highly renowned colleagues representing their specific field of expertise—are: Vittoria Ardino, Chris Brewin, Ruth Lanius, Agnes van Minnen, Rita Rosner, and Stuart Turner. I am also very pleased to be working with three statistical reviewers who will thoroughly check the methodological quality of the research articles. Finally, the journal has an Editorial Board of over 40 excellent members who will work as “ambassadors” for EJPT around the world.

The main inspiration for developing EJPT was to create a single forum for dissemination of the knowledge, expertise, and clinical experience emerging on this subject and, thus, to support an exchange between colleagues around the world who take an interest in traumatic stress and its management. EJPT will feature all levels of evidence-based health care as well as conveying practical and hands-on information for clinicians. In this way it is hoped that it will contribute to enhancing the improvement of the mental health and quality of life of people suffering from traumatic stress disorders.

Papers are welcome from academics and practitioners from diverse professional backgrounds including, but not limited to, those in mental health, medical and social sciences, and health and welfare services. Contributions from outside Europe are welcome.

The topics range from assessment and diagnosis to intervention research, the latter including preventive and curative interventions such as psychotherapy, biological and pharmacological interventions, as well as community programs. We specifically invite papers dealing with “simple PTSD” as well as “complex PTSD,” but also other trauma-related disorders such as depressive disorder, addictions, and other anxiety disorders. We include papers covering the life span of children through old age, papers on human rights, social policy, refugees, ethics groups, and culture. Papers that reflect diversity (including gender) are important. Other topics include disaster, mass trauma, military, police, emergency services, and aid workers. Research methodology papers are very welcome too, as well as the exciting developments in the field of internet, technology, and the media.

Disseminating the information under the Open Access publishing model, without barriers to access, will bring the entire psychotraumatology community together, including researchers and clinicians in countries that have hitherto been excluded from this discourse. In itself, this is likely to accelerate the scientific developments in our field and, hence, improve evidence-based treatment.

Being Open Access, EJPT is also evidence of ESTSS's stand on free accessibility of research publications to a wider scientific community via the web. There will be no print edition and no regular issues, although special issues can be created. Upon acceptance, articles will be published directly online and can then be identified (and cited) by their Digital Object Identifier (DOI) rather than—as we are used to—through volume number, issue number, and page range. In this way the time from submission to publication and to the point where the article can be read and cited by others will be the shortest possible. EJPT launches with five articles; more are already in the pipeline.

First of all we are very pleased to publish a Guest Editorial by the editor elect of the Journal of Traumatic Stress, Daniel Weiss, and the current editor, Paula Schnurr. We treasure their support and collaboration, which will only be fruitful for the field of traumatic stress studies. Also, I am pleased to tell you that the President of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS), Ueli Schnyder, has enthusiastically expressed his support for EJPT.

The ESTSS's Past President, Jonathan Bisson, and his coworkers have contributed a very useful article on “Implementing a screening programme for post-traumatic stress disorder following violent crime” (Bisson, Weltch, Maddern, & Shepherd, 2010). Andreas Maercker and Hansjörg Znoj have written a highly interesting review entitled, “The younger sibling of PTSD: similarities and differences between complicated grief and post-traumatic stress disorder” (Maercker & Znoj, 2010). You will also find an excellent publication by Iris Engelhard and her coworkers entitled, “The impact of taxing working memory on negative and positive memories” (Engelhard, van Uijen, & van den Hout, 2010) disclosing interesting mechanisms by which eye movements and playing Tetris during retrieval of emotional autobiographical memories decrease their vividness and/or emotional intensity. Also, Fear and coworkers have contributed an interesting clinical research article to this inaugural cluster of papers, “50 ways to trace your veteran: increasing response rates can be cheap and effective” (Fear, Van Staden, Iversen, Hall, & Wessely, 2010). In addition, you will find two interesting case reports on new promising forms of psychotherapy, one by Jennifer Wild and Anke Ehlers on self-study assisted cognitive therapy for PTSD (Wild & Ehlers, 2010), and one by Agnes van Minnen and her group on the feasibility of brief intensive exposure therapy for PTSD patients with childhood sexual abuse (Hendriks, de Kleine, van Rees, Bult, & van Minnen, in press).

The neurobiology of PTSD is discussed in a paper entitled 'Fear conditioning and early life vulnerabilities: Two distinct pathways of emotional dysregulation and brain dysfunction in PTSD' by Ruth Lanius, Paul Frewen, Eric Vermetten, and Rachel Yehuda (in press). These authors postulate a model of PTSD in which fear is not the prevailing emotion but is only one of several components that are implicated in a dysregulated emotional system, including fear, anger, guilt, shame, dissociation and numbing. They suggest that similar brain regions are implicated in fear processing as well as regulation of other emotions. In another interesting paper Yehuda, Bierer, Pratchett, and Malowney (in press) present a rationale and case report for glucocorticoid augmentation of prolonged exposure therapy.

Articles in EJPT will be freely available to nearly two billion people worldwide via http://www.eurojnlofpsychotraumatol.net without any need for registration or subscription. This will ensure maximum visibility and impact for the articles as they reach researchers and clinicians, allied health care professionals, as well as patient groups, policy makers, media, and the general public. All articles published in EJPT will be freely accessible online within 3–4 weeks after they have been accepted for publication and can thereafter be linked, read, downloaded, stored, printed, used, and data-mined by anybody with a computer and access to the internet. Moreover, the Open Access model offers additional multimedia benefits such as videos, audios, links to full datasets, unlimited colour budgets, and interactive features, all of which the printed medium cannot provide.

Authors retain the non-commercial copyright to their articles and are free to disseminate their work, make unlimited copies, deposit it in any repository, and more. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post items submitted to EJPT on personal or institutional websites prior to and after publication (while providing the bibliographic details).

The Publisher is currently working actively to have EJPT indexed/tracked/covered by major indexing services such as PsycInfo, PubMed, and PubMed Central, and will also try to achieve indexing with Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge (to attain an impact factor) and with MEDLINE as soon as the volume of content and other required criteria can be met. Material published in EJPT will also be distributed by EBSCO, one of the world's largest content aggregators and research database providers. It may be good for authors to know that even though it will take some time before indexing can take place, all articles, from launch onwards, will be included in the various databases when it does take place.

To conclude, I invite you to submit an article to EJPT on any of the topic areas where your research accomplishments or clinical practice experience can provide useful reference material for researchers and clinicians. We welcome

• Original basic and clinical research articles that consolidate and expand the theoretical and professional basis of the field of traumatic stress

• Review articles including meta-analyses

• Short communications presenting new ideas or early-stage promising research

• Case reports examining a single individual or event in a real-life context

• Clinical practice papers sharing experience from the clinic

• Letters to the Editor debating articles already published in EJPT

• PhD Summaries

• Book Reviews

Finally, I would like to thank our translators who kindly translate abstracts from English into German (Rita Rosner), French (Louis Jehel), Italian (Vittoria Ardano), Spanish (Dani Mosca), Russian (Marina Scherbak), Turkish (Gözde Koçak), and Polish (Maja Lis-Turlejska), and the staff of Co-Action Publishing for their invaluable contribution to getting EJPT off the ground.