Welcome to the new website for SelfCare. Our original website – created in 2010 when the journal was founded – was suffering from its age and consequent problems with security. Our new platform allows us to secure the future integrity of the site, but importantly adds functionality that we think you will find useful and interesting. We are also introducing a number of other innovations to enhance our ability to meet the needs of our users.

From October 1st 2015, the journal will publish papers approved through our peer-review process on a ‘rolling’ basis. This means that rather than refreshing the site with a new issue on a bi-monthly basis, we will add content continuously without waiting for the next issue window. In some cases this will speed publication considerably. We will continue to archive content on a bi-monthly timeframe and thus citations will continue to be organized and page-numbered by ‘issue’. We believe this innovation will be popular with authors and readers as it allows more rapid publication and access to new evidence.

From its foundation, as well as providing a home for new evidence on self-care, our journal has sought to be a discussion forum for the self-care community. We have published opinion pieces and documents discussing regulatory and healthcare policy but, until now, we have had no mechanism to encourage more immediate and informal interaction. The introduction of our blog section helps to fill that gap.

We intend our blog to host a series of discussions – some initiated by our editorial team and some by other contributors. Each discussion stream will then include moderated responses from our community and other contributors. We believe this will allow a more informal exchange of views and evidence than has been possible previously. The most popular or controversial subjects may well lead to commissioned reviews or position papers to capture the essence of the debate. We also plan to feed some blog content into the SelfCare twitter-feed to solicit views from the broader healthcare community and to highlight self-care issues more widely than before.

Finally, as a service to the self-care community, we will now feature presentations from recent self-care meetings that we feel would be of interest to professionals working in self-care. No-one can attend every meeting of relevance to self-care, so this innovation is intended to provide access to important clinical / regulatory / policy discussions that may otherwise be missed. The first presentations we feature were originally given at the 2015 AESGP annual meeting held in Barcelona. We encourage our readers to submit suggestions of specific presentations that we should make available, or of future meetings where content of interest to the broader self-care community will be aired.

Now in its 6th year, SelfCare is entering a new and exciting phase of development. We hope you enjoy the new site and the new features and we look forward to your feedback.