Putting the BMC into psychology publishing

This editorial celebrates the launch of BMC Psychology [1], the newest addition to the BMC series [2] journal group. BMC Psychology is an open access, peer-reviewed journal that considers manuscripts on all aspects of psychology, human behavior and the mind, including developmental, clinical, cognitive, experimental, social, evolutionary and educational psychology, as well as personality and individual differences. The journal welcomes quantitative and qualitative research methods, including animal studies. It is journal policy to publish work deemed by peer reviewers to be a coherent and sound addition to scientific knowledge and to put less emphasis on interest levels, provided that the research constitutes a useful contribution to the field. In this editorial, Gordon Harold, Section Editor for Developmental psychopathology, discusses why this journal will be a valuable addition to the psychology milieu, and the aims of the journal. Welcome to BMC Psychology! An exciting and innovative new publication outlet aimed at the dissemination of cutting-edge research relevant to the field of psychological science and complementary disciplines. Psychology as a discipline has a recognised and welldocumented history, with many specialist academic journals in existence that capture the breadth of topics and specialist areas relevant to what remains a relatively young field of scientific enquiry. Since the inception of psychology as a scientific discipline at the turn of the 20th century, psychology has passed through many transitions on its way to becoming a recognised scientific discipline with relevance to all aspects of human behaviour and development. Uniquely, rather than evolve into a subject defined by very strict disciplinary-based boun-daries across the course of its developmental history, psychology as a science benefits from a set of subdisciplines that each offer specificity in terms of primary scientific enquiry, while also offering synergies across areas within the field of psychology as well as disciplines that fall outside the core boundaries of psychology (e.g. medicine, law, genetics, social work). Indeed, psychology