With this issue PCEP completes its third year of publication, capping a volume consisting of papers presented at the PCE 2003 Egmond conference. During the past three years we have gone from being an unknown journal with a small number of invited submissions, to having achieved standing as the leading international journal in humanistic approaches to psychotherapy and counseling. We have now attained a healthy rate of unsolicited submissions and a backlog of articles, and are increasingly sought out as a high-profile outlet for new work on person-centered and experiential therapies.

At this point, we have three goals for developing PCEP further: to attract a wider readership; to continue to increase quality submissions; and to enhance the journal’s academic status. While we are actively pursuing these goals, we will need your help to accomplish them.

The goal of increasing readership has three elements: To begin with, we urge you to lobby your local university library to subscribe to PCEP; you will soon receive a form to give to your library requesting this. Because institutional subscription rates are higher than individual rates, even 50–100 such subscriptions would significantly enhance the journal’s financial fundamentals, while simultaneously greatly helping to make it available to students. Furthermore, PCEP’s low institutional subscription rates make it a bargain for university libraries. In addition, we have begun a campaign to encourage psychotherapy trainers to subscribe to PCEP in order to keep up with the field. Beyond this, if you run a training institute we encourage you to join the World Association as an Organizational Member, if you haven’t already. You may even want to consider offering PCEP to your members or trainees as part of their membership or training fees. Further, we are encouraging all World Association members to check with like-minded colleagues and co-workers to make sure that they know about PCEP and have the proper information about how to join (available at: www.pce-world.org/idxbecome.htm).

Our second main goal of attracting quality submissions is also a shared task. As coeditors and publisher, we do our very best to bring you an attractive, informative, high quality journal, creating a virtuous circle whereby the better the submissions, the better the journal, the better the submissions and so on. As this continues to happen, we pledge to maintain our stance of constructive, growth-oriented editing. This is not a zero-sum game, however — because we have no intention of becoming more narrow or restrictive in our editorial policy. Instead, we intend to respond to the trend toward more and better submissions by expanding the number of pages published per year (e.g., from 80 to 96 pages per quarterly issue). So: keep them coming!

Our third and in many ways most challenging goal, however, is that of achieving higher academic standing by gaining entry into widely used reference databases. Here is how it works: As a new journal, PCEP is not yet indexed in major online databases such as the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) and PsychInfo. Nevertheless, we certainly intend to do whatever we can to get indexed, because this is necessary for obtaining a citation factor, and many European and North American universities rely heavily on impact-factor values for making hiring and tenure decisions.

What are the requirements of these databases? One of the most important and stringent databases is the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), which is used for calculating citation impact (the number of times articles from a journal are cited in the literature for a given time period). The most basic requirement for admittance to the SSCI list is that a journal has established a track record of publishing regularly for a period of time. With this issue, we will have caught up to our intended quarterly publication schedule, thus beginning to meet this first requirement. We should be ready to start the process of applying for inclusion within the next year. On the one hand PCEP will easily meet most of the SSCI requirements, including complete citations, informative titles and abstracts, keywords, and especially international contributors and editorial board. On the other hand the remaining standards may be more difficult to meet, including the citation rate (especially by journals other than PCEP) and the judged importance of the journal’s content area. These are less under our control and will take time to establish. Nevertheless, we have specific ideas about how to enhance our chances of meeting these last two standards also. For example, we will be inviting writers from related but different approaches to therapy to contribute articles reflecting on similarities and differences. More importantly, we are encouraging authors to cite PCEP, especially in articles written for journals that are currently in the index, such as Journal of Humanistic Psychology, British Journal of Guidance and Counselling, Psychotherapy, and Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics. (If you are interested in more information on the process of selecting journals for SSCI coverage, more information is available at: www.isinet.com/selection). All of this is why we say: Read PCEP; submit your best work to PCEP; cite PCEP when you write!

We turn now to the papers in the present issue of PCEP, which represents the final issue to be devoted entirely to papers from the 6th World Conference for Person-Centered and Experiential Psychotherapy and Counseling in Egmond aan Zee, the Netherlands, in July 2003. In one way or another, most of the papers continue to play out further variations on the main conference theme of relational processes vs. process differentiation, extending the papers published in the three previous conference-related issues.

For example, Vahrenkamp and Behr, Purton, and Coffeng all write from an experiential or process-guiding perspective, while Sommerbeck provides a strong counterweight by emphasizing a new basis for the primacy of nondirectivity in person-centered and experiential therapies. Cornelius-White and Purton separately propose positions to overcome the dichotomy by integrating or synthesizing. In contrast, Vahrenkamp and Behr and Coffeng approach the issues from the perspective of practice, focusing on a particular clinical problem (client harsh self-criticism or recalcitrant, trauma-related difficulties). Further, we are delighted to be able to present Brouzos and Mouladoudis’s survey, bringing us up to date on the long history of the Person-Centered Approach in Greece, as well as current developments and future directions. Our therapies have spread throughout the world, taking on local flavor and color wherever they take root. We look forward to more such commentaries from near and far!

Finally, we think that you will find the Annual Index at the end of this issue particularly useful for navigating all four PCE 2003 Conference issues (and for a comprehensive index to all published volumes of PCEP, go to the journal website: www.pce-world.org/pcep.htm).

Robert Elliott, Dave Mearns and Peter F. Schmid