I want to begin by wishing the International Practice Development Journal (IPDJ) and everyone connected with it a happy fifth birthday: the IPDJ has completed its first five years, following our launch in June 2011. It’s fair to say that this partnership between the International Practice Development Collaborative and the Foundation of Nursing Studies (FoNS) has been a great success, with approximately 160 articles and commentaries published in 10 issues and two special issues. That’s quite a ‘body’ of material. We have published, and will continue to publish, a wide range of articles on practice development and related fields. More remarkable, perhaps, is the collaborative way in which the journal operates; it is an independent journal (not part of a big publishing house), which is funded and governed by members of the collaborative, and managed and published by FoNS.

This year the editorial team made the decision to adopt in full the principles of open access in accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition. This means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Further, users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full texts of the articles of this journal without seeking prior permission from the publisher or the author (fons.org/library/journal-about-ipdj). Being free of concerns regarding ‘impact factor’ rating will liberate us in a number of ways. Of course, I recognise the need to work within this rating and other metrics, such as citation measures, but these should not alone determine the merit of a researcher or a journal (Bornmann et al., 2011). We hope that authors and readers will recognise this and continue to support the journal’s growth.

Our birthday issue brings something a bit different and, I feel, offers a special treat. Consider this to be like a slice of your favourite birthday cake. Usually the original research articles in section one outnumber those on reflective practice in section two. For this issue, though, the pendulum has swung the other way and the reflective practice articles are more abundant (I’d like to say this was by design – but it just happened that way!) Because of that we have an invited overall commentary on the critical refection articles, which makes a really interesting read. We also have a piece that I hope practice developers will take particular take note of, as it’s a challenge to us in relation to how we position ourselves in terms of service and quality improvement. We would welcome more critical debates on various aspects of practice development.

https://doi.org/10.19043/ipdj.61.001

This article by Jan Dewing is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 3.0 License.