European Journal of Psychotraumatology

One year has now passed since the European Journal of Psychotraumatology (EJPT) was launched in December 2011. Since then, the journal's website has been visited over 17,000 times by almost 11,000 different visitors from 144 countries around the world. Readers in the USA, Netherlands, Germany, UK, and Sweden have been most active, closely followed by those in Canada, Australia, Austria, Norway, and Switzerland. Researchers and others in countries such as Rwanda, Peru, Egypt, and Afghanistan, who would never have been able to buy a subscription, now have free access to much needed data and knowledge in the field of psychotraumatology. They are also frequent visitors to the EJPT website!

Although the journal now celebrates its 1-year anniversary it has in fact already published two volumes—Volume 1 in 2010 and Volume 2 in 2011. Considering that EJPT is a new open access, online-only journal waiting for important indexing, we have been very satisfied with the inflow of papers and have been able to publish a good mixture of high-quality review articles and clinical and basic research papers, in addition to a study protocol and a handful of case reports, book reviews, and editorials. All papers (except PhD summaries) undergo strict peer review, and the time from submission to publication is 2–3 months.

The three most downloaded full-text articles over the past year are:

1. Developmental trauma, complex PTSD, and the current proposal of DSM-5 by V. Sar—which has been downloaded 2,400 times. This is quite remarkable considering that it was not published until March 7 2011 (Sar, 2011).

2. Fear conditioning and early life vulnerabilities: Two distinct pathways of emotional dysregulation and brain dysfunction in PTSD by R.A. Lanius, P.A. Frewen, E. Vermetten, and R. Yehuda—which has been downloaded 2,392 times since it was published on December 10 2010 (Lanius, Frewen, Vermetten & Yehuda, 2010). This article has also already been cited six times in other scientific journals!

3. The younger sibling of PTSD: Similarities and differences between complicated grief and posttraumatic stress disorder by A. Maercker and H. Znoj—downloaded 2,012 times since December 6 2010 (Maercker & Znoj, 2010).

The abstract book from the European Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ESTSS) congress in Vienna in June 2011 has also received a great many visits (12th European Conference on Traumatic Stress, 2011).

Ten of the articles published during the first year have already been cited in other journals and there appears to be a relationship between number of downloads and citations, a possible effect of open access on article impact. The six citations of the paper by Lanius et al. (2010) have already been noted. Other articles that have received citations are The impact of taxing working memory on negative and positive memories by Engelhard, van Uijen and van den Hout (2010)—four citations since December 2010; Glucocorticoid augmentation of prolonged exposure therapy: Rationale and case report by Yehuda, Bierer, Pratchett and Malowney (2010)—three citations since December 2010; and 50 ways to trace your veteran: Increasing response rates can be cheap and effective by Fear, Van Staden, Iversen, Hall and Wessely (2010), and Developmental trauma, complex PTSD, and the current proposal of DSM-5 by Sar (2011)—each with two citations.

So far, EJPT is indexed in DOAJ, Google Scholar, JournalSeek, Open J-Gate, ProQuest Summon, and ProQuest PILOTS Database. Early next year there will be enough scientific content for us to apply for coverage/indexing in PubMed Central, the free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), developed and managed by NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information in the National Library of Medicine. Once there, the journal will automatically be included in PubMed. In addition, we will be applying for indexing in PsychInfo and then, in a next step, seek inclusion in MEDLINE and Thomson Reuter's Current Contents/Social and Behavioral Sciences, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Science Citation Index Expanded. We may well have an official impact factor by 2014 or 2015.

The Associate Editors—Vittoria Ardino, Chris Brewin, Ruth Lanius, Agnes van Minnen, Rita Rosner, and Stuart Turner—with the help of the excellent editorial board have been successful in getting high quality papers into the journal. They will continue to secure high-quality papers in the 2012 volume and, from January 1, they will be joined by Marylène Cloitre, immediate past President of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS) and founder and director of The Institute for Trauma and Stress at the NYU Child Study Center. She is an expert in the field of traumatic stress and has published extensively on the treatment of survivors of childhood abuse.

We welcome reviews as well as research and clinical practice papers on all aspects of psychotraumatology—long or short. Research protocols are also welcome; we believe this represents an exciting new opportunity to publish all the details that traditional papers primarily presenting results, or a subset of the measures used, cannot normally accommodate (see Mouthaan, Sijbrandi, Reitsm, Gersons & Olff, 2011). It may also help other colleagues plan how to conduct a trial and what measures to use. Such sharing of direct and concrete experience is fundamental for improving the quality and conduct of trials worldwide. As EJPT is free for anybody to read, these protocols may in fact have a decisive impact and also facilitate more detailed comparisons between studies.

In an attempt to make sure that the valuable articles published in the EJPT obtain “deep” dissemination, and as a service to those members of the ESTSS who are not proficient in English, we provide translation of the abstracts in up to nine different European languages: Italian, French, German, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Dutch, and Ukrainian. However, although EJPT is the official organ of ESTSS, authors from outside Europe are also very welcome to submit papers to the journal and share their experience and knowledge with their European peers so that our discipline can move forward by means of a mutually rewarding discourse. In fact, we have already published papers from the USA (Ruzek et al., 2011; Novacovic et al., 2011) and Australia (Carty, O'Donnell, Evans, Kazantzis & Creamer, 2011).

So in just 1 year, the EJPT has developed into a very important reference source, with all the benefits of open access publication, and a considerable international audience. With your support, it can only go from strength to strength. Tune in next year and we will update you on further progress!