Update on WPA Operational Committee on Scientific Publications

The WPA Operational Committee on Scientific Publications has been quite active in the last year, meeting several times via conference call and at various WPA meetings. The WPA has the aim to provide easy access to up-to-date psychiatric information and research for clinicians and researchers from all over the world1, 2. To achieve this, under the leadership of R. Heun (Royal Derby Hospital, UK), one of the main goals has been to update the WPA website (www.wpanet.org) by providing a list of links to online journals that include peer-reviewed open-access papers. The quality of the content is the responsibility of the authors and the individual journals. The provision of the links is supported by the national psychiatric associations, but it is not an endorsement of the content of the papers and journals. R. Heun and WPA Secretary General R. Kallivayalil have been determining how best to improve the website and make it user-friendly3. Thanks to the generosity of P. Chandra (National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore, India), a research assistant has been tasked to help with this project.

P. Tyrer (Imperial College London, UK) has had discussions with the UK Royal College of Psychiatrists about making papers from the journals International Psychiatry, BJP Open and Psychiatric Bulletin linked to the WPA website, and these have been concluded satisfactorily. Discussions are also taking place with the Wiley journal Personality and Mental Health over its articles being available as the journal is linked to the Section of Personality Disorders at the WPA4, 5.

C. Szabo (University of Witwatersrand, South Africa) has been involved in coordinating symposia at various WPA meetings (Tbilisi, Georgia; Cape Town, South Africa) related to publishing and publications, with an emphasis on Operational Committee activities in this regard and a specific focus on developing countries. J.M. Castaldelli-Maia (Medical School of Fundação do ABC, Brazil) has also been quite helpful at developing materials for young psychiatrists regarding how to get published and the process of review and mentorship.

A. Cia (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina) has been very successful at developing and building a library of scholarly work that is translated into Spanish. This has been a very ambitious project, supported by the WPA, and has been tremendously appreciated.

Co-Chair D. Lecic Tosevski (Belgrade University School of Medicine, Serbia), within the very successful 15th Congress of Serbian Psychiatric Association (Belgrade, October 12-15, 2016), organized several events targeting young psychiatrists with the aim to discuss how to prepare and publish scientific papers.

We have appreciated the support of WPA President D. Bhugra6, President-Elect H. Herrman7, Secretary General R. Kallivayalil, and administrative support from F. Sotgiu and P. Atiase. We appreciate the ongoing support of WPA Past President M. Maj, under whose leadership World Psychiatry has become no. 1 among psychiatric journals in terms of impact factor (new value: 20.205), also entering the top 50 of all scientific journals indexed by Thomson Reuters.