Today I’ve been at this year’s meeting of the International Mental Health Nursing Research Conference scientific committee. This convened at the Royal College of Nursing headquarters in London. We had a good range of abstract submissions to deliberate over, and people can expect emails soon informing them of our decisions. We’re also pleased to have been able to identify our annual Mental Health Nurse Academics UK Lecturer for 2018. I dare not make an announcement on this front in this post, and shall wait for official communications to be made first.

Hopefully #MHNR2018, which takes place in Manchester in the middle of September, will be a lively and well-attended affair. There is, it has to be said, space for the conference committee to receive and deliberate over a larger number of conference abstracts than it did today. For #MHNR2019, my early request is: spread the word, and get writing. And for #MHNR2018, for people who missed the abstract submission date: do consider, if possible, participating as a delegate anyway.

Elsewhere, having been stuck in the PLOSONE editorial and peer review system for a spectacularly long period, this week’s good news on the mental health research front includes the acceptance for publication of a paper reporting the COCAPP metanarrative review of care planning and coordination. This has been lead authored by Aled Jones, and once it becomes available in the public domain I’ll post a link. Also accepted for publication this week is a paper lead authored by Jane Davies, derived from her PhD which I supported as a supervisor with Danny Kelly. Jane’s study was an investigation into choice and control in young people with cancer, and this article accepted by the European Journal of Oncology Nursingreports some of Jane’s main findings.

Talking of publications, later this week I head into a meeting of the Cardiff University Press editorial board. Up to now I haven’t written much on this site about the Press, which has been around since 2014 and supports journal publishing in diamond open access form. The Press is in the process of extending into monograph publishing, too, having struck an agreement with Ubiquity. For people looking to move their existing journal titles, or to found new ones, the Press is a good place to go and information on opportunities of this type can be found here.

• Mental health
• Nursing
• People
• Research