Editorial

It is a time of change within the Journal.

For some years now the editors have been sounding out the possibility of moving our ‘process’ on to an electronic basis. In pragmatic terms this would mean papers would now need to be offered via our submissions website—known as ScholarOne—rather than being emailed to the Journal editorial office. Email has of course now completely superseded the old arrangement of post and print which was still the norm when I submitted my first paper some while ago. We trust this next transition will come to seem just as inevitable, and make the necessary adaption to our evolving environment just as seamlessly.

Other journals in our field—notably the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and the British Journal of Psychotherapy—have already moved on to a web basis: we have held off for longer because we have always valued the element of personal responsiveness that we feared might be compromised by the apparent impersonality of following instructions on a website. A consequent concern, now perhaps anachronistic, was that this might particularly discourage those not sufficiently ‘web-savvy’. But such is the accelerating ubiquity of the web that this no longer feels like a significant consideration.

As for the ‘impersonality’ factor we shall have to see. Actually there is a real prospect that it might improve our perceived ‘responsiveness’ if it fulfils its promise to streamline our process and thereby shorten our turnaround time: there is nothing more blankly impersonal than anxious authors who invest such hope and expectation in their submissions having to wait six months or more to learn their fate. Moreover in co-operation with our publishers, Wiley, we have gone to some lengths to customise our site to make it as user friendly as possible. We look forward to going live with it in the new year: there will of course be help and advice very much available.

I mentioned that the ScholarOne system is intended to facilitate the processing of su