This year, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health (CAPMH) became the official journal of the International Association for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Allied Professions (IACAPAP). IACAPAP is an international organisation whose mission is to ‘advocate for the promotion of the mental health and development of children and adolescents through policy, practice and research’. As an online, open access journal, CAPMH is in a prime position to support this goal by allowing free access to all of its publications, to ensure that research in this vital and growing field is widely disseminated throughout the world.

To commemorate this affiliation, today the journal has published an Editorial, written by Christian Kieling and Andrés Martin, which considers the growth of child and adolescent psychiatry research over the past decade, and the importance of open access publishing in removing barriers to publications in this essential field of research. The Editorial emphasises that CAPMH is key in this aim, and its affiliation with IACAPAP can be seen as a significant catalyst in global research efforts. This Editorial also serves as part of the introduction to a new thematic series published today in CAPMH, entitled ‘Identity’, the concept for which stemmed from discussions between CAPMH Editors and IACAPAP representatives at the last IACAPAP congress in Paris in 2012.

This series is a collection of articles about different perspectives on ‘identity’; a topic currently under much discussion since the recent release of the alternative model of personality disorders in the Fifth Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). In the introductory series Editorial, Klaus Schmeck, Susanne Schlüter-Müller and CAPMH Editor-in-Chief Jörg Fegert, discuss the potential impact that DSM-5 could have on the concept of ‘Identity’ and the definition and diagnosis of personality disorders, and provide an introduction to the articles in the series.

Contributions to the series include a review of the role of identity in the DSM-5 classification of personality disorders, a study looking at identity development in adolescents, and a commentary which considers both neurophilosophical and neuroscientific accounts of the concept of ‘self’.

CAPMH is a open access journal that provides an international platform for rapid and comprehensive scientific communication on child and adolescent mental health across different cultural backgrounds. To stay up-to-date on publications in the journal, please register and sign up for article alerts, or for more information on the journal, please visit the journal’s about page.