RHP&EO is the electronic journal of the International
Union for Health Promotion and Education
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RHPEO New Year's resolutions for 2004by Michel O'Neill, Université Laval, Canada O'Neill, M. RHPEO New Year's resolutions for 2004, Reviews of Health Promotion and Education Online, 2004. URL: 4/index.htm. In my culture, the francophone culture of Québec, as in many others I am sure, early in January we have this custom of making resolutions for the new year. They often are the same year after year because they are hard to achieve (I am going to loose these few extra pounds, ... to quit smoking, ... to be more physically active, etc.); so I will not make any here !!! But what this resolutions business usually makes you do is take stock about the year just finished and look ahead at the year that comes. It is what I intend to do here. For RHPEO, 2003 was the second year of operation after its launch at the IUHPE XVIIth world conference in July 2001 in Paris. On the papers side of things, it has been a quiet year: just one new contribution in our first series, a very interesting paper by prof. Evelyne de Leeuw on the books that have influenced her thinking about policy. But we have not been idle and a lot has been going on behind the scenes. The single most important thing has been the recruitment in August of a managing editor to support me in the numerous tasks involved in running on a voluntary basis an international electronic journal. Sophie Dupéré is a nurse and a new graduate student in our PhD in community health at Laval University in Quebec City, Canada. She comes back to school after several years of work as a practitioner and research assistant in community and intercultural health, which has brought her on several continents over the years and in working with immigrant populations in Montréal. She is fluent in the three official languages of IUHPE which are also the ones of our journal: English, French and Spanish, and brings with her the energy and enthusiasm of young professionals, in addition to keeping the gender balance among the editorial group. Sophie has already made a big difference in helping to finalize our panel of reviewers and interacting with them for the production of papers. Currently, we have 21 reviewers from 15 different countries and we are confident to reach our goal of about 30 in the few months to come; the task is not easy because we don't give up about getting more people from Africa and Asia, even if maintaining fluent communication on the internet is not as easy in many parts of these continents as it is in other parts of the world. If 2003 has been quiet papers-wise, 2004 will be very different: there is already a very original paper up, by Michael Sparks from Australia, where beyond paper and electronic materials, he points at compassion and mentoring as two of the key resources that have been the most helpful in his career. Check it out at 1/index.htm. We currently have six papers in various stages of processing, including two in Spanish, that should be up on the site within the next couple of months; and we expect almost as many by the end of the year. Finally, what we will begin in a few weeks from now is the more interactive part of our journal. As you can see everywhere if you read the reviews, you can react to them by clicking on a link (if you are an IUHPE member though; this reaction privilege is reserved to members whereas anybody can have access to the journal; so join by going to http://www.iuhpe.org/ if you are not a member but are interested to partake in the debates). We received from Australia a first quite intriguing reaction not to a paper in particular but to several of the papers of RHPEO since it began; this discourse analysis of eight reviews, that you will be able to access shortly in clicking on the link just below the one that led you to this paper, is quite provocative and will no doubt trigger all kind of reactions. So we are looking forward to this interaction in the weeks to come. In the mean time let me wish you all a healthy and peaceful year. Bonne année 2004, et n'hésitez pas à écrire en français si c'est votre langue maternelle. Feliz año, y no dude en enviar comentarios en español si es su lengua materna ! Michel O'Neill Editor in chief, Rédacteur en chef, Redactor in jefe, RHPEO.
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