About the Journal

Aims and Scope

Mental health systems are shaped less by discoveries than by decisions — what is accredited, what is funded, what is measured, who is authorised to practise. That machinery is under-researched relative to its consequences, and the literature on it is scattered across health policy, health services research and professional regulation.

This journal publishes peer-reviewed work on the governance of mental health care. Its scope covers:

  • Standards and accreditation — the design, adoption and evaluation of standards for services, training and practice; evidence on whether accreditation changes what it claims to change.
  • Policy and financing — national and international mental health policy, its translation into financing and workforce arrangements, and the gap between commitment and implementation.
  • Clinical guidelines — the development, adaptation and cross-jurisdictional harmonisation of guidelines, and studies of their uptake in practice.
  • Governance and oversight — regulation, professional registration, the coordination of oversight bodies, and the ethics of regulatory power.
  • Implementation and outcomes — services research, quality-improvement studies, and the measurement of population-level mental health outcomes, including equity of access.

The journal welcomes work that reports negative or null findings: a standard that did not improve outcomes is as informative as one that did, and considerably rarer in print. It does not publish clinical trials of individual treatments, neuroscience, or psychotherapy technique unless the work bears directly on governance, standards or policy.

Peer Review Process

The journal operates double-anonymous peer review: authors and reviewers are not disclosed to one another at any stage.

Submissions are first screened by the editors for scope, ethical compliance and methodological adequacy, and may be declined at that stage with reasons given. Manuscripts that pass screening go to at least two independent reviewers with no institutional affiliation or recent collaboration with the authors. Where the field is small enough that anonymity cannot be guaranteed, the editors say so to the author rather than pretending otherwise. Material disagreement between reviewers is resolved by a third review; the final decision rests with the handling editor.

Decisions are one of four: accept; accept with minor revisions; major revisions with a further round of review; or decline. The target interval between submission and first decision is eight weeks.

Because this journal publishes work about accreditation and regulation, and is published by a body active in that field, two safeguards apply. Editors recuse themselves from any manuscript evaluating a standard or programme in which they have a role. Manuscripts evaluating the publisher's own instruments are handled by editors independent of them, and that independence is stated in the published article.

Publication Frequency

The journal publishes on a continuous basis: articles appear as soon as final editing is complete, and are gathered into annual volumes for citation and indexing.

Publication Ethics

The journal follows the COPE Core Practices. Authorship follows the ICMJE criteria. All submissions are screened for similarity against published literature. Research involving human participants must state the approving ethics committee and reference number and confirm informed consent. Allegations of misconduct are investigated under the COPE flowcharts, and corrections, expressions of concern and retractions are published in a form linked bidirectionally to the original article.

Policy research carries a particular hazard: the body evaluated is often the body funding the evaluation. Authors must declare the relationship between any evaluated programme and their own funding, employment or advisory roles. Undeclared, that relationship is a competing interest; declared, it is usually just context.

Archiving

The journal participates in the LOCKSS and CLOCKSS distributed archiving networks, which permit participating libraries to create permanent archives for preservation and restoration.