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Global Mental Health (GMH) appears as a new Open Access journal, just as 'Global Mental Health' emerges as a new field. It is necessary, and timely: current international survey data suggest that mental illness is a key driver of population wellbeing, with evidence suggesting that mental healthcare might be a more cost-effective investment than physical healthcare for improving that outcome (Helliwell et al. 2013). The huge and growing morbidity burden attributable to common mental conditions (Murray et al. 2012; Vos et al. 2012), and their multiplier effect on the morbidity and mortality of other medical conditions (Prince et al. 2007), have prompted governments in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs) to increasingly and more aggressively pursue scalable solutions to close mental health treatment gaps (Ssebunnya et al. 2012; Mental health has increasingly become a part of the global health scientific agenda (Becker & Kleinman 2013). Among the signs of this are multiple special series on global mental health in The Lancet, a global Delphi exercise identifying research priority 'Grand Challenges' for global mental health reported in Nature (Horton 2007; Collins et al. 2011), a Grand Challenges Canada funding initiative to support those priorities