A Heartfelt Thank-You for the Opportunity to Serve and for Your Support

We very much appreciate the opportunity to have served NASAP as coeditors of The Journal of Individual Psychology (JIP) for 18 years. Actually, we applied for the editorships in 1997 and began working on JIP in January 1998 before our editorships officially began, so from that perspective we have worked on JIP for 19 years. During that time we have edited 18.5 volumes, or 74 issues. The first issue we submitted as coeditors was Volume 55, Issue 1, and the last issue was Volume 73, Issue 2, although Volume 73, Issue 3, the second in a series of two issues with Jon Carlson as guest editor, was ready to be sent to the press for publication at the time we left the editorship at the end of January 2017.

In the first issue we edited in spring 1999, we set out the following three goals in the Editors’ Notes: “to expand the base of contributors to the journal, to identify more specifically the needs of the readership, and to promote a team approach.” An additional goal we later articulated in our second issue was increasing research-based articles in Individual Psychology that employed quantitative and qualitative empirical methods. In addressing these goals, we received amazing support over the years from many people, including our managing editors, guest editors, NASAP leaders, graduate research assistants, administrators at Georgia State University, administrators and editors at the University of Texas Press, associate editors, reviewers, authors, and—last but not least—our readers.

Through our editorial team, some of the ways we addressed these goals were by conducting a readership survey, creating standing columns, increasing the number of guest editors, increasing the number of reviewers (including international reviewers), distributing the full text of JIP through the electronic aggregators EBSCO and Project MUSE, and initiating use of Scholastica for managing manuscript submission and review. We also participated in a group for editors of psychology journals.

In our first issue, we reinstituted columns by creating the following seven columns in JIP, with leading Adlerians as column editors: Biopsychosocial Issues, Education: Teaching the Ideas, Family Interventions, Research, Business and Organizations, Psychological Strategies, and Reports and New Developments. Later, we expanded the scope of the Education: Teaching the Ideas column to become Education and Supervision.

As of 2016, the distribution of JIP articles through EBSCO placed full-text articles in libraries in 126 countries, greatly increasing the dissemination of the theory and practice of Individual Psychology. When we negotiated and signed the original contract with EBSCO in 2002, we were able to have issues of JIP back to 1974 digitized and placed on the EBSCO website at no additional cost, and this made more than 25 years of back issues available electronically. As of fall 2016, the number of libraries with access to EBSCO is 2,666 in the United States, 287 in Canada, and 2,320 in other countries around the world. In 2014, we expanded electronic distribution through Project MUSE, which, during the 2015 calendar year, distributed JIP issues to 510 libraries in the United States and Canada and 1,142 libraries inter nationally. Also, Project MUSE allowed for full-text JIP articles to be available on the NASAP website for members of NASAP. Both of these aggregators provided additional financial support to NASAP and the editorial process. Throughout the process of making JIP articles available on the Internet, we owe a debt of gratitude for the help and encouragement we received from the University of Texas Press, and especially to Sue Hausmann, assistant director and journals manager at the Press, and Karen Broyles, production coordinator.

In 2015, our managing editor, Jaclyn DeVore, encouraged us to use Scholastica, a platform for managing the communication process involved in journal editing over the Internet. Currently, using the Scholastica website, authors submit their manuscripts, reviewers receive and comment on manuscripts, and editorial decisions and other communications are transmitted.

Early in our editorship, we joined the International Council of Editors of Psychoanalytic Journals and attended most of their yearly meetings. At these meetings, approximately 20 editors would...