What does the Journal of Women's Mental Health publish?

Journal of Women's Mental Health publishes peer-reviewed research on mental health across women's lives: how mental disorder and mental well-being present, how they are measured, how they are treated, and how care reaches the people who need it. Its territories are perinatal and reproductive psychiatry; hormonal and life-stage influences; trauma, adversity and their sequelae; social and structural determinants; access to and organization of care; and measurement, mechanisms and population patterns. It considers clinical, epidemiological, health-services and qualitative research from any country.

Who publishes the journal?

The journal is published by Open Access Pub. Its abbreviation is JWMH.

Is the journal open access, and under what license?

Yes. Every article is open access and free to read from the day it is published, under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license, with authors retaining copyright.

How do I submit a manuscript?

Through ManuscriptZone, the publisher's submission portal; through the simple manuscript submission form, which opens preselected for this journal; or with assistance from the editorial office at info@openaccesspub.org. Authors must use only one submission route for the same manuscript.

Journal of Women's Mental Health | JWMH

The subject

Why women’s mental health is a field, not a filter

Research that reports on women is not, on its own, research about women’s mental health. This journal looks for work in which sex, gender, reproductive stage, or the social position of women is part of the research question rather than a variable recorded in passing. These are the reasons the field gives for studying it directly.

Reproductive transitions: Pregnancy, the postpartum period and the perimenopausal transition are periods of altered risk for mood and anxiety presentations, and periods in which treatment decisions carry their own considerations.
Recognition and diagnosis: Presentation, referral and time to diagnosis differ by sex and by gender for several conditions — attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder among them, where recognition in girls and women is frequently later.
Trauma exposure: The prevalence and the form of interpersonal violence differ by gender, and research on its mental-health consequences has to account for that difference rather than adjust it away.
Treatment evidence: Evidence on treatment during pregnancy and lactation is generated separately from the trials in which many agents were first studied, and is read differently in practice.
Social position: Caregiving, income, employment, migration status and legal standing shape both the risk of mental disorder and the ability to reach care.
Organization of care: Where services sit, who staffs them and how referral works determine which presentations are seen at all, and the answer is not the same across settings.

Sex and gender are not interchangeable, and women are not one population. Risk, presentation, treatment response and access to care differ across age, reproductive stage, culture, income and setting, and a finding in one group is not a finding about all of them. The journal expects that distinction to be made in the work it publishes.

Scope

Six territories the journal considers

Read together rather than as separate sections. Work that crosses two or more of them is within scope, and so is work in any of the four directions of study the journal considers — clinical, epidemiological, health-services and qualitative.

Perinatal and reproductive psychiatry: Mental health in pregnancy, the postpartum period, and around pregnancy loss, termination and fertility care, including cognitive and mood change across reproductive transitions and the considerations that treatment in these periods carries.
Hormonal and life-stage influences: Puberty, the menstrual cycle, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, hormonal contraception, the perimenopausal transition and later life, and the endocrine contributions to mood, anxiety and psychotic presentations.
Trauma, adversity and their sequelae: Interpersonal and structural violence, post-traumatic presentations, early-life adversity and adult outcomes, and the coping, resilience and adaptation processes that follow them.
Social and structural determinants: Income, housing, caregiving, employment, migration, education, workplace conditions and discrimination studied as determinants of mental health rather than as background variables, including minority stress and intersectional analysis.
Access to and organization of care: Service design, referral and continuity, treatment engagement, task-sharing and workforce, and the treatment gap across high-, middle- and low-income settings.
Measurement, mechanisms and population patterns: Development, validation and cross-cultural adaptation of instruments, measurement invariance across populations, the cognitive and behavioral mechanisms underlying mood and anxiety, and epidemiological studies of prevalence and disparity.

Full scope

Read the full aims and scope, which states the study designs the journal considers and where its boundary sits.

Latest research

Latest published research

Open access from the day of publication, and free to read in full without registration.

Uncovering the Gaps and Linkages: Exploring Postpartum Mood and Anxiety Disorders and Experiences for Clinicians and Parents within One Northern Community Perinatal and postpartum mental health Research article Volume 1, Issue 1 Pages 40–50 February 20, 2026
Unveiling Gender Disparities in ADHD: A Literature Review on Factors and Impacts of Late Diagnosis in Females (2010-2023) Recognition and diagnosis across gender Research article Volume 1, Issue 1 Pages 9–21 May 30, 2024
Rights of Women with Mental Illness (WWMI): Nigeria in Context Mental health rights and access to care Research article Volume 1, Issue 1 Pages 1–8 December 19, 2023

The journal’s published record stands at 5 published records in Volume 1, across 2 issues. The archive is the authoritative list, and the current issue carries the issue in progress.

Handling

How manuscripts are handled

All submissions undergo initial editorial screening. Manuscripts that meet the journal's scope and minimum requirements proceed to independent peer review.

Peer review

Single-blind by default; double-blind review is available on request. Manuscripts that proceed to external peer review are normally evaluated by at least two independent subject-matter experts.

Decisions

Editorial decisions are based on scope, scientific quality, methodological rigor, ethical compliance, reporting quality, and relevance to the journal. Editorial decisions are independent of fees, membership, editorial roles, and any optional author service.

Independence

Editors recuse themselves from decisions on their own submissions, and those manuscripts are handled independently. Review speed is not sold, and no route through the journal can be purchased.

Editorial board

3 editorial board members in 3 countries, 2 with an ORCID iD. Members are named with their roles and affiliations on the editorial board page. The editorial policies state the full handling, appeals and complaints procedure.

Integrity

Research integrity in mental-health research

This journal’s participants are people describing their own mental health, and often people who are pregnant, recently delivered, bereaved, or describing violence. These are the commitments that apply to every manuscript; the editorial policies and the instructions for authors state them in full.

Ethics and consent: Research with human participants reports the approving ethics committee and the consent procedure under which it was conducted. Case material is publishable only with documented consent for publication.
Privacy and sensitive data: Mental-health information is treated as sensitive throughout. Manuscripts remove detail by which a participant or a service user could be recognized, and data-availability statements say what can and cannot be shared and why.
Vulnerable and perinatal participants: Where participants are pregnant, recently delivered, bereaved, detained, or recruited while receiving care, the manuscript describes the additional safeguards applied to recruitment, consent and withdrawal.
Suicide and self-harm: Research touching suicide or self-harm follows recognized safe-reporting practice: method and means detail is not published, and findings are reported without framing that could serve as instruction.
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 availability: Every empirical research manuscript must include a data-availability statement.
Reporting standards: Manuscripts follow the reporting guideline that matches the design — CONSORT for randomized trials, STROBE for observational studies, PRISMA for systematic reviews, STARD for diagnostic accuracy — and report the instruments used and their validation status.
Interests and funding: Financial and non-financial interests and all funding sources are declared by authors, and by editors and reviewers who handle the manuscript.
Responsible interpretation: Observational associations alone do not establish causation; causal analyses should state assumptions, address bias and report uncertainty and sensitivity analyses. Interpret findings within the design’s strengths and limitations, including the population and setting to which they apply.
Corrections and retractions: Errors in the published record are corrected in the public record, through a correction, an expression of concern, or a retraction linked to the original article.

Terms

Publishing terms, access and availability

The same terms apply to every article the journal publishes, and the same figures appear on every page that states them.

Terms that apply to every article
Term	What applies
Access	Open access. Every article is free to read from the day it is published.
License	Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
Copyright	Retained by the authors.
Peer review	Single-blind by default; double-blind review is available on request.
Article processing charge	USD 1,200, charged only after acceptance.
Submission	One route per manuscript. The three routes are listed below.

Article processing charge

USD 1,200.

Charged only after a manuscript has been accepted.

There is no submission fee.

Fee-relief inquiries go to the editorial office before or at submission; a request has no bearing on the editorial decision.

Read the full charge and withdrawal terms.

Funder deposit

Eligible NIH-funded manuscripts may be deposited individually in PubMed Central through the NIH Manuscript Submission System (NIHMS).

Preservation

This journal’s content is committed to Portico, a not-for-profit digital-preservation archive run by ITHAKA (the organization behind JSTOR). As articles are deposited they enter Portico’s permanent archive, so the scholarly record stays available for the long term — even if a title one day ceases to publish.

In brief

Questions authors ask

The answers below are the same facts the rest of this page states.

What does the Journal of Women's Mental Health publish?: Journal of Women's Mental Health publishes peer-reviewed research on mental health across women's lives: how mental disorder and mental well-being present, how they are measured, how they are treated, and how care reaches the people who need it. Its territories are perinatal and reproductive psychiatry; hormonal and life-stage influences; trauma, adversity and their sequelae; social and structural determinants; access to and organization of care; and measurement, mechanisms and population patterns. It considers clinical, epidemiological, health-services and qualitative research from any country.
Who publishes the journal?: The journal is published by Open Access Pub. Its abbreviation is JWMH.
Is the journal open access, and under what license?: Yes. Every article is open access and free to read from the day it is published, under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license, with authors retaining copyright.
How are manuscripts reviewed?: All submissions undergo initial editorial screening. Manuscripts that meet the journal's scope and minimum requirements proceed to independent peer review. Single-blind by default; double-blind review is available on request. Manuscripts that proceed to external peer review are normally evaluated by at least two independent subject-matter experts. Editorial decisions are based on scope, scientific quality, methodological rigor, ethical compliance, reporting quality, and relevance to the journal.
What does it cost to publish?: The article processing charge is USD 1,200, charged only after a manuscript has been accepted. There is no submission fee. Fee-relief inquiries go to the editorial office before or at submission, and a request has no bearing on the editorial decision.
How do I submit a manuscript?: Through ManuscriptZone, the publisher's submission portal; through the simple manuscript submission form, which opens preselected for this journal; or with assistance from the editorial office at [email protected]. Authors must use only one submission route for the same manuscript.

Submission

Submit a manuscript

Journal of Women's Mental Health welcomes submissions throughout the year from researchers, clinicians, and multidisciplinary teams working across women’s mental health. Regular submissions are accepted throughout the year.

Approved submission routes
Primary route	ManuscriptZone — The publisher’s submission portal.
Alternative route	Simple manuscript submission form — Preselected for this journal.
Assisted route	[email protected] — Editorial office assistance with a submission.

Authors must use only one submission route for the same manuscript. The instructions for authors state what to prepare before submitting.

Submit a manuscript

Journal pages

Every page of the journal

Scope, oversight, policies, the published record, and the author pathway, each on its own page.