RHP&EO is the electronic journal of the International Union for Health Promotion and Education

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A word from the Editor in chief: From IJHP to RHP&EO

by Michel O'Neill, Ph.D.

Times change. Things evolve. And even more so at the age of the Internet. In this brief paper, I just want to explain a little to the readers of the former Internet Journal of Health Promotion (IJHP) and to the readers to be of the Reviews of Health Promotion and Education Online (RHP&EO) what has happened to the former, and what the latter will be.

A bit of historical context

Under the strong leadership of Dr. Bridget Hsu-Hage and with a group of dedicated reviewers, IJHP was launched and operated from 1995 to 1999, publishing a total of 29 papers (one in 1995, six in 1996, six in 1997, 15 in 1998 and one in 1999). In addition to the more classical peer reviewed papers, that electronic venue also provided information on a variety of events of interest to health promotion/health education scientists and professionals, a discussion forum on the papers that was utilized by scholars and the general public as well as electronic proceedings for three important international conferences.

At the annual meeting of the Board of Trustees of the International Union for Health Promotion and Education (IUHPE) held in Quebec City, Canada, in June 1999, the possibility was offered to IUHPE to take charge of the editorial function of IJHP, Dr. Hsu-Hage proposing to keep the function of webmaster of the site. The offer was accepted in principle, provided its feasibility was assessed by a technical group of IUHPE's Board members. This assessment was a lengthy process which lasted almost a year. Among other things, elements like the fact that IUHPE already had an official paper publication, Promotion & Education and had already arrangements with two Oxford University Press journals which are available online, Health Education Research and Health Promotion International, as well as the type and levels of resources to operate an electronic journal in a membership based low budget global organisation, were carefully considered. At its December 1999 executive meeting in Paris, France, the IUHPE finally decided to accept the offer and decided to transform IJHP rather radically from a classical peer reviewed electronic journal to a new type of journal which would provide a yet unheard of tool: a palmares of the best papers published in the field. The original idea came out of Board members from the Netherlands, and several months were spent to refine it, figure out its sustainability, its potential market, etc. Finally the terms of reference as well as the new name of the journal, Reviews of Health Promotion and Education Online were accepted at the Board meeting held in Mysore, India, in April 2000 where I was proposed as Editor in chief, an appointment that was conditional to the reorganization of my workload as Professor in the Faculty of Nursing at Laval University. The confirmation of this workload reorganisation, thanks to the Dean of that Faculty Professor Linda Lepage, came in late June 2000, just before I took off for a period of conferences abroad followed by vacation time and the rush of a new academic year. Finally, the real work to reorganise the journal is thus beginning this month, in September 2000.

All this explains thus why there has been a huge time gap between the last article published by IJHP in November 1999 and the first issue of RHP&EO, that will be out in 2001.

What will RHP&EO be ?

As mentioned above, RHP&EO will not be a journal of original articles. According to the terms of reference adopted by IUHPE Board of Trustees, (...) the purpose and aim of RHP&EO is to improve the quality of health promotion and health education by publishing regularly a rating of recent articles (...) that are relevant for its development, implementation and evaluation (RHP&EO, terms of reference, IUHPE, Paris, June 27 2000, p.1). Consequently please do not submit manuscripts to it nor to the former IJHP. If you want to submit a manuscript, depending of the nature of the topic, you might consider to send it it to one of the other official journals of IUHPE which are described at http://www.iuhpe.nyu.edu/pubs/index.html. RHP&EO will rather be a global journal of reviews offered by IUHPE members to the field, proposing at regular intervals a palmares of the best papers published in the field during a specific period of time (ideally, quarterly) with and abstract of each paper, a comment by the people who have submitted it explaining why it is so good as well as, ideally again, the paper itself either through an electronic link if it is already online or in PDF format.

My job as Editor in chief is to recruit the six other members of the Board of Editors as well as the international correspondents who will report on papers they think are qualifying, to develop with the board of editors a process for identifying and rating the papers, to see that they are put on the journal's website properly (including negotiations with the publishers of the original articles) and see that the site is properly marketed internationally to IUHPE membership as well as to the practitioners, scholars, students and others in the field of health promotion and health education. As the journal grows, we will try very hard to diversify our coverage by including other languages than English, by constituting maybe more than one quarterly palmares (we could have one more targeted to scholars, one for practitioners, one for books, one in Japanese, etc.). The possibilities are limitless and in a world where very few people have time to read extensively, our belief is that this strategy of knowledge dissemination to the global community in our field will be met with enthusiasm and that a global organization like IUHPE has the legitimacy and the networks to make it work.

We have thus begun to implement the terms of reference, and issue # 1 of RHP&EO is planned to be launched to celebrate IUHPE 50th anniversary in July 2001, during the XVIIth World Conference of Health Promotion and Health Education to be held where the first was, in Paris, France (for information on the conference, see the website http://www.iuhpe.nyu.edu). So, in the mean time, thanks for your patience. Operationalising this new exciting idea is quite challenging and we are very confident that this patience will be significantly rewarded. In the mean time, if you have any comment or question, do not hesitate to contact me at Michel.ONeill@fsi.ulaval.ca. Finally in order to make clear the fact that RHP&EO evolved from IJHP, you can browse through the papers that were published in IJHP; they will be permanently archived on this site as a testimony to the people who started it, contributed to it and came to read it and the people who will try to reach its former website will redirected to the RHP&EO site at .

Copyright © 1999-2007 Reviews of Health Promotion and Education Online,