Pursuing the journal mission.

The mission of The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, as articulated in its Instructions for Authors, is to be a forum for the exchange of multidisciplinary ideas and thoughtful and respectful scholarly analyses related to the theory and practice of forensic psychiatry. Recent refinements of The Journal's structure and policy can be understood as an effort to articulate a vision for emphasizing vibrant exchange of diverse scholarly activities and ideas expressing the highest levels of professionalism and concern for the ethics of forensic psychiatry and publishing. In this article, we explore the challenges encountered in realizing that vision, including managing the tone and level of discourse, creating structure without inhibiting creativity, demonstrating respect for persons in the use of case report material, expanding and guiding the utilization of peer review, promoting the new voices of authors with less writing experience, defining conflicts of interest for publishing purposes, and maintaining editorial independence in the context of serving organizational needs. We illustrate these challenges with recent experiences, explicating the decisions of the senior editors in an effort to be transparent about The Journal's processes and to encourage feedback from our readers about the adequacy of these practices.

Ethics in forensic psychiatry publishing.

Several organizations have developed guidelines to help authors and editors of medical journals negotiate ethics dilemmas in publishing, but very little is known about how these guidelines translate to the context of forensic psychiatry. In this article, we explore the important topic of ethics in forensic psychiatry publishing. First, we review the historical development of ethics principles in medical and psychiatric publishing. We then analyze eight ethics dilemmas that have arisen in the publication of The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law (The Journal) from 2000 to 2009, including disputes about authorship, conflict of interest, redundant publication, bias in peer reviewers, confidentiality in case reports, and others. We identify ethics principles that were relevant to the dilemmas and discuss how they were resolved by the editors of The Journal. We conclude by using the principles identified in the practical resolution of ethics dilemmas to derive a conceptual foundation for ethics in forensic psychiatry publishing.