Support for the expansion of the open access journal "European Journal of Psychotraumatology"

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Rita Rosner
• Subject Area: Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
• Term: from 2014 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 254667591

On the initiative of the European Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ESTSS) and its then Chairperson, Professor Miranda Olff, the European Journal of Psychotraumatology (EJPT) ¿ the first and only Open Access journal in the world on Psychotraumatology ¿ was launched in December 2010. Prof. Miranda Olff has served as editor-in-chief, the applicant of this proposal Prof. Rita Rosner served as a Co-Editor since the beginning. The start-up phase and costs generated during 2011 were financed by ESTSS. EJPT is the official organ of the ESTSS. The journal is published by the Stockholm based Open Access Publisher Co-Action Publishing. In 2011 Prof. Olff won a three-year grant from the Dutch Research Foundation (NOW; Incentive Fund Open Access Journal) which has supported the build-up phase of EJPT - among other financial sources. Between December 2010 and June 2013 a total of 102 articles have been published. The journal has an unofficial impact of 1.531, is listed with PsychInfo and PubMed since 2012 and is archived with PubMed Central. The Journal¿s topics range from assessment and diagnosis to intervention research, the latter including preventive and curative interventions such as psychotherapy, biological and pharmacological interventions, as well as community programs, papers dealing with ¿simple PTSD¿ as well as ¿complex PTSD,¿ but also other trauma-related disorders such as depressive disorder, addictions, and anxiety disorders. Papers cover the life span of children through old age, as well as papers on human rights, social policy, refugees, ethics groups, and cultural issues.Although promising steps have been made to enable the journal to be self-supportive, this aim is not likely to be achieved until the journal has an official impact factor. Although the first Thompson Reuters evaluation is planned for winter 2013/14, few journals pass a first evaluation. Due to financial problems of ESTSS, related to the financial crises in southern Europe, first measures have been taken to make the journal self-sustainable, such as introducing fees to all authors. Until now publication in EJPT is free for ESTSS-members. We therefore apply for ¿ 15900 in 2015, ¿ 14470 in 2016 and ¿ 11970 in 2017 to ¿buy¿ time to develop and expand the journal further so as to get it fully indexed and furnished with an impact factor such that the journal becomes even more attractive to publish in, to get library contracts and to be become increasingly interesting to other professional societies.

• DFG Programme: Science Communication, Research Data, eResearch (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)