The First Year with the Scandinavian Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychology

The Scandinavian Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychology (SJCAPP) is now one year old, and it is time to make a status report and also to revise our strategy for the future. The general idea behind SJCAPP was to create an open-access, no publication-fee, fast-process, high-quality, online scientific journal for child and adolescent psychiatric and psychological research and clinical practice. We strongly believe in open access as the future solution for research policy and practice. The latest results from international research should always be readily available to everyone, regardless of the economy of their university or institution. More-over, open access also increases the research impact of the publishing author (1).

The choice of not having a publication fee has been possible only because of the willingness of many voluntary contributors and the positive support from the Psychiatric Research Unit in Region Zealand, Denmark. We hope to keep things this way as long as possible, but we realize that we may need some economy when the number of submissions grows. When we established SJCAPP, we had an unofficial goal as a young journal of publishing five to six articles during the first year, doubling that the next year, and then gradually converging toward publishing one article per week. We ended up publishing seven scientific papers during the first year, which we consider to be a good result. All of these papers have been downloaded a large number of times. In fact, as of November 1, 2013, there have been 4939 article downloads from SJCAPP since the first article was uploaded. It has also been interesting to follow the activity on the SJCAPP site using tools such as Google Analytics (2). Two main conclusions can be drawn from this: The readers of SJCAPP come from all over the world, and interest in SJCAPP has been steadily increasing.

Being indexed or abstracted in the large databases is of highest priority for SJCAPP. In 2013 the journal was indexed in NOAP and PKP. The journal can be searched on Summon, Google, Google Scholar, and worldcat.org. We will continue to expand our accessibility in 2014 by sending applications for indexing to PubMed, DOAJ, Index Copernicus, and Journal TOCs. We also have a very distinct goal of finally having the journal indexed by the Thomson ISI Web of Knowledge and receiving an impact factor. Even prior to establishment of PubMed indexing for the journal overall, authors can submit the accepted versions of their manuscripts to PubMed Central (PMC) in compliance with the U.S. NIH Public Access Policy.

We are fortunate to have an extremely competent group of section editors and reviewers, and we are grateful for their contributions to the quality of the journal.

There is a plan for five special issues of SJCAPP to be published during the next two years. One special issue will focus on personality disorders in adolescents and will be guest-edited by Erik Simonsen and Mickey Kongerslev and overseen by Ole Jakob Storebø; the second, which will address the autism spectrum, will be guest-edited by Angela Reiersen and overseen by Sven Bölte; the third issue about psychosis in children and adolescents will be guest-edited by Ulrik Haahr and overseen by Sune Bo; the fourth issue, which will focus on attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, will be guest-edited by Niels Bilenberg and overseen by Sven Bölte; and the fifth issue about attachment and psychopathology in children and adolescents will be guest-edited by Pernille Darling Rasmussen and overseen by Ole Jakob Storebø. We are optimistic that these special issues will further strengthen the profile of SJCAPP; a special call for papers is planned for each of the issues and will be sent to experts in the respective fields.

We are currently discussing additional possibilities for the future development of the journal. We plan to inform researchers about the journal at international conferences. The journal’s website will be enriched and more user-friendly, and we will engage a web editor to improve the interface. Increased interconnection of the journal with various social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, is on our agenda. The proposed twin impact factor may be a useful and timely metric to measure the uptake of research findings and to filter scientific findings for communication with the public (3). We now have two social media editors, Trine Danvad Nilausen and Erica Ramstad, who will help us with this process.