About JBTM · Open Access Pub
About the Journal of Behavior Therapy And Mental Health
JBTM is a peer-reviewed, open access journal for research on behavior therapy, psychological interventions, and mental health, including mechanisms, assessment, prevention, treatment, recovery, and services.
This page sets out what the journal is, the scholarly purpose it serves, and the principles that govern how it handles the work it publishes. Topic eligibility is on Aims and Scope, and the full terms are in Editorial Policies.
Definition
What the journal is
The journal in one paragraph, and the boundary of its subject matter.
The Journal of Behavior Therapy And Mental Health (JBTM) is a peer-reviewed, open access journal published by Open Access Pub under ISSN 2474-9273. It publishes research on behavior therapy and mental health, including basic, clinical, population, and methodological work with a substantive contribution to either field.
Behavior therapy includes behavioral principles and cognitive behavioral approaches, their assessment, and the processes that inform treatment. Mental health includes wellbeing, distress, mental disorders, determinants, lived experience, recovery, and care. Research in either area may contribute independently.
Methodologically the journal is broad rather than partisan. Randomized and non-randomized trials, single-case experimental designs, observational and survey research, qualitative studies, psychometric development and validation, systematic and integrative reviews, and clinically instructive case reports are all within its remit, provided the design is appropriate to the question asked and reported in enough detail for a reader to judge it.
The journal welcomes basic, clinical, and population research with a substantive contribution to behavior therapy or mental health. Basic laboratory and theoretical work is considered when its question contributes to behavior therapy or mental health. Immediate clinical application is not required; claims about mechanisms and outcomes must be supported by the design and evidence.
Purpose
Why the journal exists
The gap in the treatment literature the journal is trying to close.
Behavioral and psychological treatments are among the best-evidenced interventions in mental health care, and they are also among the least consistently reported. A treatment that works in a university clinic is described in enough detail to be replicated far more often than the same treatment delivered by a non-specialist in a district service, and the measurement that would let a reader tell the two apart is frequently missing from both.
Making interventions legible
The journal asks for the behavior or outcome under study to be operationally defined, and for the measurement approach to be described well enough to be repeated. A reader should be able to tell what was delivered, to whom, by whom, and how the result was established.
Mechanism as well as effect
Whether a treatment works is one question; how it works is another, and the second is frequently the more useful one. Work on the processes that carry behavior change is welcome in its own right, not only as a secondary analysis of a trial.
The settings that are under-represented
Low-resource services, non-specialist providers and populations outside the university clinic are where most mental health care is actually delivered and where the least treatment research is published. Work from those settings is particularly welcome.
Measurement that supports interpretation
Psychometric development, routine outcome monitoring, clinical significance and reporting standards are treated as substantive contributions rather than as methodological housekeeping, because without them a reported change cannot be interpreted.
The two halves of the title
How behavior therapy and mental health connect
What joins the two halves of the title, and what a manuscript must show.
Behavior therapy and mental health are connected fields with independent scientific contributions. The diagram illustrates one approach to intervention research: relating a process, treatment, proposed mechanism, and measured outcome. It is not a required sequence for all manuscripts.
A manuscript should state its contribution to behavior therapy or mental health and interpret results within the limits of its design. Studies of determinants, prevalence, experiences, or measurement may qualify independently of an intervention.
Readership and contributors
Who the journal is for
The researchers, clinicians and services the journal is written for.
JBTM is written for researchers, clinicians, and multidisciplinary teams studying behavior therapy and mental health, including clinical and counseling psychologists, behavior analysts, psychotherapy and intervention researchers, psychiatrists, mental health nurses, behavioral medicine researchers, and academic clinicians whose work spans a clinic and a research question.
The journal also expects a second readership, and writes for it deliberately: people who commission, staff or manage mental health services and who need to know whether a reported effect is large enough, and described well enough, to act on.
The journal publishes scholarly research. It does not publish clinical guidance for patients, and no article in it should be read as advice about an individual's care.
Evidence and integrity
How the journal treats evidence
How a conclusion is held to the design that produced it.
Mental health research is unusually easy to overstate, and the journal's editorial standards are built around that. A conclusion is expected to match the design that produced it: an association is reported as an association, a single trial is reported as a single trial, and a finding from one setting is not extended to a population that was not studied.
Design and reporting
The design must be appropriate to the question, and reported in enough detail for a reader to evaluate it. Reporting guidance appropriate to the design is expected, and deviations from a registered protocol or analysis plan are expected to be declared.
Ethics, consent and privacy
Studies involving human participants must report ethical approval and consent arrangements. Manuscripts reporting on identifiable participants must document consent to publish, and authors are expected to report clinical and demographic detail no more precisely than the scientific question requires.
Trial registration
Interventional clinical trials must be registered in an accepted public trial registry at or before the first participant provides consent for enrollment. The registry name, registration number, and registration date must be reported in the manuscript.
Data, funding and interests
Every empirical research manuscript must include a data-availability statement. Authorship, funding and competing-interest disclosures are required at submission, and are published with the article.
Where a correction, an expression of concern or a retraction is warranted after publication, it is issued as a citable notice linked to the article it concerns, so the record shows what changed and why. The full requirements are set out in Editorial Policies and the Instructions for Authors.
Research on sensitive subjects
Work involving distress, risk and vulnerability
Research about people in difficulty, handled as such.
Research within this journal's scope routinely concerns depression, anxiety, trauma, substance use, self-harm and suicidality, severe mental illness, and participants who are unwell, detained, bereaved, under age or otherwise in circumstances that limit how freely they can consent.
Manuscripts on these subjects are handled as research about people in difficulty, not as topics of interest. Editors expect the consent and safeguarding arrangements to be described rather than assumed, risk-management and referral procedures to be reported where participants were screened for risk, and reporting to follow the accepted conventions for work on self-harm and suicide. Identifying detail is reduced to what the science requires.
Sensitive diagnoses are not used as attention devices anywhere on this journal's pages, and no article is presented in a way that invites a reader to apply it to themselves or to a patient without clinical judgment.
Publishing principles
How the journal publishes
Review, independence, access and the permanence of the record.
Peer review
Single-blind by default; double-blind review is available on request. All submissions undergo initial editorial screening. Manuscripts that meet the journal's scope and minimum requirements proceed to independent peer review. Manuscripts that proceed to external peer review are normally evaluated by at least two independent subject-matter experts.
Editorial independence
Editorial decisions are based on scope, scientific quality, methodological rigor, ethical compliance, reporting quality, and relevance to the journal. Decisions remain independent of fees, services, memberships or editorial roles.
Open access and licensing
Articles are published open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license, and authors retain copyright. There is no subscription, no registration and no embargo between publication and a reader.
Identifiers and the published record
Articles are registered with Crossref under the DOI prefix 10.14302, so each has a persistent link and its metadata reaches the services that consume Crossref. Identifier registration is not journal-level indexing; the Indexing page keeps the categories apart.
Publication is funded by an article processing charge, payable after acceptance only. There is no submission fee and no charge for editorial handling or peer review, and payment has no bearing on whether a manuscript is accepted. The current charge and its terms are on the Article Processing Charges page.
Editorial responsibility
Who is accountable, and for what
The named roles behind every decision.
Manuscripts are handled by named editors, and the people who carry that responsibility are listed with their institutions on the Editorial Board page.
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Editor-in-Chief
Holds final responsibility for the journal's scope, its editorial standards and the decisions taken under them. Shahid Ullah serves as Editor-in-Chief. The Editorial Board provides the journal’s editor profiles and affiliations.
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Editorial board
Members handle manuscripts within their own expertise, advise on scope, and identify reviewers who can assess a specific design rather than only a topic. The board spans clinical psychometrics, clinical psychopathology and psychotherapy research, child and adolescent psychiatry, and biostatistics.
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Peer reviewers
Reviewers are selected for methodological as well as topical fit, so a treatment trial and a psychometric validation are not assessed against the same criteria. Reviewer responsibilities, including confidentiality and the handling of manuscript files, are set out in the reviewer guidelines.
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Conflicts and recusal
Editors recuse themselves from decisions on their own submissions, which are handled independently, and from any manuscript where a personal, professional or financial interest could reasonably be perceived to affect the decision.
Journal facts
The record, in short
Verified identifiers and terms, in one place.
- Full title
- Journal of Behavior Therapy And Mental Health
- Abbreviation
- JBTM
- ISSN
- 2474-9273 (electronic)
- Publisher
- Open Access Pub
- Subject
- Behavior therapy and mental health research, including mechanisms, assessment, prevention, treatment, recovery, and services
- Access model
- Open access; no subscription, registration or embargo
- License
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0); authors retain copyright
- DOI registration
- Crossref, prefix 10.14302
- Peer review
- Single-blind by default; double-blind review is available on request
- Language
- English
- Publication history
- Published since 2015. The complete record is in the Archives, and the most recent issue is at Current Issue.
- Editorial office
- Contact the editorial office
Where to go next
Reading the journal, and writing for it
Aims and Scope states what the journal considers and where its boundary falls. Editorial Policies carries the full terms on ethics, consent, disclosure and corrections. The Instructions for Authors set out preparation and reporting requirements before a manuscript is prepared.
- Aims and Scope
- Editorial Board
- Editorial Policies
- Instructions for Authors
- Current Issue
- Archives
- Indexing
- Article Processing Charges
Journal of Behavior Therapy And Mental Health (JBTM) · ISSN 2474-9273 (electronic) · Open access under CC BY 4.0 · Crossref DOI prefix 10.14302 · Published by Open Access Pub · Contact the editorial office