Welcome to the first 2020 issue of the International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research (IJMPR). IJMPR had a very successful 2019—downloads to the journal's content increased by over 50% in 2019 compared to 2018. We published a highly topical Special Issue on the WHO World Mental Health International College Student (WMH‐ICS) Initiative in June 2019, which has so far accrued over 13,500 downloads. The Special Issue can be accessed here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/15570657/2019/28/2.
With a new year come new developments for the journal. We are constantly looking for ways to ensure that we continue to best serve authors' needs—from maintaining the continued high quality of research published in IJMPR, to improving the speed and efficiency of our peer review and publication process. As such, we are very pleased to announce that IJMPR has transitioned to an open access journal, effective January 2020. As a result, all submissions to IJMPR will be subject to an Article Publication Charge (APC) if accepted and published in the journal. Since 10th July 2019, all articles submitted and accepted for publication in IJMPR have been published open access under a creative commons license. You can find details of the APCs here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/15570657/article_publication_charges.html and details about IJMPR's open access licensing and copyright here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/15570657/homepage/open_access_license_and_copyright.htm?. If you have any questions regarding this transition, please feel free to contact the editors directly.
For authors, publishing open access creates more permissive use and sharing of their articles due to more flexible licenses, which in turn helps to increase the dissemination of their research. From Wiley's experience of transitioning journals to open access, we know that this can result in a significant increase in downloads and readership of the journal's content. We also continue to see many institutions and global funders developing open access policies and mandates for their authors. As such, we would like to ensure that we are making it easier for authors to fulfil their funders' mandates on open access publication. IJMPR will join several other high impact journals in the Wiley Open Access portfolio (http://www.wileyopenaccess.com). For readers, it will enable easier access to published research, giving greater visibility to both the authors and research published in IJMPR.
From an editorial perspective, there will be no change to the journal's workflow. All submissions to IJMPR will continue to undergo the same stringent peer review as previously, and decisions will still be made by the editorial team—very ably led by Prof. Dr. Hans‐Ulrich Wittchen and Prof. Dr. Katja Beesdo‐Baum. In the course of 2020, we will be expanding and updating the Editorial Board to ensure that new science and research areas are comprehensively represented. To attract more authors to IJMPR, we will broaden our focus to cover new developments in comparative effectiveness research and the heterogeneity of treatment effects, as well as recent developments in methodological issues (e.g., decision curves, double robust estimation weighting to adjust for non‐random exposure in quasi‐experiments).
IJMPR will continue to place strong emphasis on publishing high‐quality content. We are excited for IJMPR's transition to open access and hope that we can continue to count on you all, as readers and authors of IJMPR, to submit your high‐quality research to the journal.