Abstract
Aim, scope and mission
Health Psychology Open (HPO) is a peer-review, open-access, online-only journal in which authors/funders pay to publish, meaning that readers everywhere will read the articles for free. It is a companion journal to the well-established Journal of Health Psychology (JHP). The aim of HPO is to support and help shape research in health psychology from around the world using the speed and universal coverage of the Internet. In synergy with JHP, HPO provides a new platform for traditional empirical analyses as well as more qualitative and/or critically oriented approaches. It also addresses the social contexts in which psychological and health processes are embedded.
HPO is an online-only journal aimed at an international and multi-specialty readership that includes researchers and professionals involved in the application of Psychology to all aspects of health, illness and health care. HPO will publish articles of interest to any reader wishing to improve knowledge about the psychological aspects of health, illness and health care. Research papers in the following categories will be included: Report, Review, Systematic Review, Intervention Study, Clinical Trial, Case Study and Commentary.
HPO builds on the performance of JHP, launched in 1996, and SAGE Open, launched in 2011. The launch of HPO is an exciting opportunity to serve all those researchers seeking an open-access outlet by disseminating vital research to the broadest, international community free at the point of delivery. With no restriction on page extent for individual articles, but with no compromise in quality, HPO will provide a high-quality online-only outlet for the very best, cutting-edge health psychology publications, particularly for those authors with specific funder mandates or those who need to publish a longer, more detailed paper than the print journal will allow.
The publisher SAGE has commissioned me to establish HPO as an online-only, open-access, peer-review journal for health psychology. The SAGE London office and the SAGE New Delhi production team provide a solid infrastructure for this new enterprise. I particularly thank Kerry Barner, Commissioning Editor, Social Sciences, at SAGE London who has given her heart and soul to this project with massive amounts of enthusiasm, help and support. A big Thank You, Kerry!
In serving as Editor of JHP for 20 years, I have built a foundation of experience. I am supported by an incredible Editorial Board of 60 outstanding researchers who offer significant breadth and depth of expertise in health psychology internationally. I warmly thank the five long-serving Associate Editors, I Chris McManus, Michael Murray (retiring), Ken Wallston, Carla Willig and Helen Winefield (retiring) and welcome three new Associate Editors Ronán Conroy, Seth Kalichman, and Jane Ogden and many new Editorial Board members to the Joint Editorial Board of JHP and HPO listed on the journal website: http://bit.ly/UpZahV.
In addition to the wonderful Editorial Board, JHP and HPO have an unrivalled panel of more than 10,000 expert peer reviewers to consult about submissions. I thank all of the invisible, anonymous, yet invaluable reviewers for their unstinting, high-quality input, about which authors have commented so often to be the most constructive and helpful that they have experienced. Expert peer reviewers are the lifeblood of the journal, and I am beholden to them for their professional dedication to the service of their peer researchers in health psychology.
HPO will operate with the same philosophy as JHP: the same Editor, Editorial Board, independent peer-review system and high quality of output. The unrivalled international outlook of JHP is evidenced by its publication of papers from more than 70 countries. The global content for JHP and HPO will be extended further in Africa, Asia and South and Central America with new Joint Editorial Board members: Cecilia G. Conaco (Phillipines), Ashraf Kagee (South Africa), Luo Lu (Taiwan), Chandra Y. Osborn (USA), Tina Rochelle (Hong Kong, China), Leslie Swartz (South Africa), Catherine S-K Tang (Singapore), Claudia Unikel-Santoncini (Mexico) and Xiaofei Xie (Beijing, China), all of whom I warmly welcome to the Board.
Why a new open-access journal? Back to the future
The open-access movement has gained huge momentum over the past couple of years. Nobody has a crystal ball, but open-access publication looks set to become the future of academic publishing. JHP grew rapidly from a quarterly to eight issues per year and then became monthly in 2013. While further expansion of the print journal is not impossible, the creation of a companion, open-access journal seemed a natural progression.
HPO was foreshadowed in my first Editorial for JHP (Marks, 1996). There I referred to a Journal of Health Psychology Open Electronic Network (JHP-OPEN) to facilitate research communications on the Internet. This concept may have taken nearly 20 years to incubate but it has never been more necessary. JHP submissions are fast approaching one thousand a year with a necessarily increasing rejection rate. Many articles of excellent, publishable quality have had to be reluctantly rejected because of their extensive word length. I know because I have lost sleep over it! Systematic reviews, meta-analyses, many qualitative studies and large survey reports, for example, often require generous amounts of space that can be a problem for a print journal such as JHP with page constraints yet no amount of special pleading from authors of long works has been allowed to hold sway.
The ability to publish high-quality papers with open access will not happen at the cost of speed. JHP statistics show that the average time from submission to first decision is 47 days, to final decision, 68 days, and to online publication, 110 days. However, these last two stages include an uncontrolled variable, the time authors take to revise a manuscript to reach an accept decision. With planned changes, we are aiming to shorten the average total time from submission to online publication to within 60–90 days.
Figure 1 shows the fate of more than 5,000 manuscripts submitted to JHP. The acceptance rate was 16.7%. More than 25% of submissions were rejected prior to peer review as ‘inappropriate’ because the papers either were beyond the scope of the journal or unblinded (approximately 5% of submissions) or exceeded the word-length guidelines (about 20% of submissions). From now on, authors of a submitted article that exceeds JHP word-length guideline of 6,000 words will have a choice: either they can shorten the manuscript to a maximum of 6,000 words of text for peer review for JHP or leave it intact and enter peer review for potential publication in HPO. It will be entirely up to the author which option they choose.
Number of manuscripts by decision.
Guidelines for authors
Apologies in advance if this section appears heavily bureaucratic but, please bear with me, it is necessary. A lot of wasted time and effort can be avoided for all parties if authors can adhere to the guidelines for manuscript submission that are published at: http://bit.ly/1pYNP58
Manuscripts should be prepared according to the SAGE UK Style Guide as described at: http://bit.ly/1kLIxqF
To minimise delays, authors should follow the requirements below:
HPO will aim at an international readership and manuscripts should address a health psychology or health care issue that is relevant to a global audience. The literature review should indicate the generic relevance of the issue and reference the international literature, not only papers based on a literature from a single country. A purely medical, nursing or other perspective that does not show any psychological relevance will be rejected. Interdisciplinary topics that include a psychological perspective together with a strand from one or more other disciplines are welcomed.
It is essential that the literature review engages with other authors’ work in health psychology journals and is fully up to date. Papers with a majority of citations outside of health psychology are unlikely to be accepted unless they fully explain their psychological significance. Please check recent issues of JHP and other key journals to ensure that all relevant papers are cited, including any that are critical of the theoretical position or methodological approach. Papers that do not cite recent relevant publications in the health psychology literature will be rejected.
Subject to peer review, HPO will normally publish papers of any length without restriction.
The title should be concise and to the point, normally using 150 characters or less. The Abstract should not exceed 100 words.
To enable ‘blind’, impartial review, all documentation must be anonymised. Title pages need to be removed. This includes citations and references to prior publications by the author(s) which should have the authors’ names replaced with ‘XXX’. A common error is to include the author’s name in the Word document title, as in Smith (blind copy).doc. Such manuscripts will be rejected for re-submission in a fully ‘blinded’ fashion.
Manuscripts that report data from previously published studies should justify why the paper is necessary in terms of theory, methodology and/or new understanding of the topic. In such cases, the method, procedures and participants should be described. Simply referring readers to the method section of prior publications in (an)other journal(s) is not acceptable.
HPO welcomes research reports regardless of the direction or strength of the results including replication studies.
HPO will consider only reports of clinical trials that have been pre-registered at: http://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ or http://www.controlled-trials.com/.
Keywords should be selected from the list provided on the HPO ScholarOne website.
Figures and tables should be placed where they are meant to appear in the main text.
A note at the end of the text, prior to the Reference section, should clearly state any conflicting or competing interests, which reviewers need to consider when reviewing the paper. If the authors believe that there are no conflicting interests, then please simply state, ‘No conflicting interests’.
HPO publishes papers written in the English language. Manuscripts by authors who are not native speakers of English should be carefully proofread prior to submission by a native speaker or professional translator.
Intervention studies and clinical trials
In line with its companion JHP, HPO has adopted the proposal from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) that requires, as a condition of consideration for publication of clinical trials, registration in a public trials registry. Trials must register at or before the onset of patient enrolment. The clinical trial registration number should be included at the end of the abstract of the article. For this purpose, a clinical trial is defined as any research project that prospectively assigns human subjects to intervention or comparison groups to study the cause-and-effect relationship between a medical intervention and a health outcome. Further information is available at: http://www.icmje.org.
Reports of intervention studies need to follow the journal’s guidelines published in January 2010 (Marks, 2010). To avoid any misunderstanding of the procedures, authors of reports of randomised controlled trial (RCT) studies should complete the ‘CONSORT 2010 checklist of information to include when reporting a randomised trial’ available at: http://www.consort-statement.org/consort-statement/ and include the completed form as an Appendix for the Editor and reviewers (but not for publication).
Authors of reports of non-randomised evaluations should complete the ‘TREND statement checklist’ available at: http://www.cdc.gov/trendstatement/ and include the completed form as an Appendix for the Editor and reviewers (but not for publication).
Authors of systematic reviews should follow the recommendations of the QUOROM statement on quality reporting of meta-analyses of RCTs (Moher et al., 1999) by adding a table detailing the characteristics of each study included (e.g. study design, participant characteristics such as age, gender, disability, details of the intervention and primary outcomes).
Publication charges
An introductory Article Processing Charge (APC) of US$750/£470, discounted from the full rate of US$1500/£940, is available for a limited time. The APC is payable upon acceptance and subject to VAT 1 where applicable.
Gold open-access APC waivers
If you would like your article to be published in HPO, but you genuinely cannot afford the APC, the corresponding author should submit a waiver request to the journal when payment is required, after acceptance of the manuscript. Your ability to pay will not affect the editorial peer-review outcome. Requests will be assessed on a case-by-case basis, and priority for partial and full waivers will be given to authors who reside in the countries described by the Research4Life programme. For more information, please go to the SAGE website: http://www.uk.sagepub.com/aboutus/waivers.htm or contact Libby Brown at: