The new open access journal on health psychology and behavioral medicine: why do we need it?

On behalf of the editorial board, it is our pleasure to introduce Health Psychology and Behavioral Medicine: an Open Access Journal (HPBM), which we hope will become a leading international journal in these areas. HPBM will be interdisciplinary and global in scope, offering studies in a wide range of forms including systematic and critical reviews, meta-analyses, ethnographic and qualitative studies, quantitative studies, program evaluation, policy studies, case studies, and research protocols. Individually and in combination, these publications will contribute to the development and integration of psychosocial, behavioral, and biomedical knowledge to promote and maintain health, to prevent, treat, and manage physical and psychological illness, and to identify etiological and diagnostic correlates of health and illness. Discrete but related topics including assessment, prevention, diagnosis, treatment, prognosis, and rehabilitation that contribute to health will be featured. The need for this new journal stems from both recent developments in the fields of health psychology and behavioral medicine, and the recent revolutionary movement of academic publishing into online dissemination.