The Mental Health Clinician (MHC) Editorial Board is forging steadily ahead to expand the reach and enhance the stature of our organization's practice journal.
During 2014, the MHC will undergo major transformation into a form that CPNP can be proud of long into the future. Some of the changes have already been made with the January issue. Volumes will now align with calendar years for simplicity, and we will reduce frequency to bimonthly to ensure that we never sacrifice quality for quantity. Thus, January was Volume 4, Issue 1, and there will be six issues this year.
With this new volume, the MHC is eliminating some non-scholarly features that were not connected to our strong thematic content and open submissions. Author photos and other soft content are eliminated so that all of the focus goes to the scholarly content. On a larger scale, the CPNP News and Announcements will now reside in a new publication, The CPNP Perspective. The CPNP Perspective will continue to provide annual meeting highlights, committee reports, government affairs updates, member news, and other items of general interest to our membership.
Starting in 2015, the MHC will be copublished by an external vendor who will help facilitate the rapid maturation of our journal. Starting in 2015, every article will go through closed peer review, will have clickable references (when possible), will have a DOI assigned for easier referencability, and will be made available as a PDF. At that point, the infrastructure will be able to support interaction with a variety of Abstract and Indexing services, once we are ready for that step.
With sights set on 2015, the MHC Editorial Board is already hard at work making the necessary preparations. Editorial board peer review is being replaced with standard closed peer review, which will be used on the majority of articles this year. All past issues are being revisited and converted to PDF to be imported into the new system for permanent archival.
The MHC is only able to make this transition because of the efforts of hundreds of CPNP members who contributed as editors, authors and peer reviewers. A special note of thanks and congratulations goes out to the current members of the editorial board:
This is an exciting time of transition for the MHC. Look for the next issue in March 2014.