As the International Practice Development Journal comes to the end of its eighth year, the editorial team is already planning the issues for 2019. So we’re not standing still by any means. Of course, the IPDJ still has much to achieve as it moves towards becoming internationally recognised as a high-quality and high-profile open access publication for health and social care practitioners, educators and academics working in practice development and related fields. One significant step in the pipeline is the search for a new academic editor and I hope, by this time next year, the person we have chosen will be shadowing me and getting ready to lead the journal as we move towards a new decade.

We have set out our commitment to publish and make freely accessible scholarly inquiry into practice development and related fields (such as person-centredness). We also want to publish material that challenges assumptions and provokes new visions and ideas, helping health and welfare workers engage in dialogue about the contribution practice development and related approaches can make. This is an area to which we really need to give greater attention, and anyone with methodological contributions is warmly invited to make a submission for 2019. In addition, we intentionally enable first-time and novice writers to publish their practice development work in a scholarly way by facilitating the formation of writing partnerships with more experienced writers and through coaching with writing. By doing this, we are contributing to ensuring future generations of nurses are equipped to publish their activities.

Although, open access status is criticised by some in academia, we believe our status as such and our registration with the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) have a positive impact on our readership. For example, DOAJ registration requires that we use DOI numbers, which we believe is enhancing our accessibility. We can see from our website ‘metrics’ that readership numbers are increasing, as are downloads of IPDJ articles. Overall, we are pleased to see interest in the journal continuing to grow; the average number of articles downloaded is rising year on year, with 1,000 per month in 2018 – in our first year the monthly average was just 75.

This article by Jan Dewing is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 3.0 License.