SWOSU Digital Commons

•  
•  

Introduction

Greetings from the AIJ Editorial Board. My name is Jared Edwards, and I am a Counseling Psychologist with a specialization in Vocational Psychology. I joined the AIJ board in the fall of 2015.

As a relatively new member of the board, I want to share with you that I have seen first-hand the commitment of the board to providing a platform for diverse topics from diverse fields while maintaining a high level of rigor in the review process. We take seriously our mission to provide the ability for researchers to share their studies with a global audience and to ensure the quality of that content.

In preparing to write my first Letter from the Editor, I reviewed the letters from my colleagues and predecessors on this board. It was encouraging to see the consistency in mission from Editor-In-Chief Dr. Tami Moser's first letter to the discussions, process, and decisions that I am now a part of. The growth in building on that mission and the constant focus on becoming an even better journal for both our authors and our readers is clear.

In the most recent Letter from the Editor (Volume 6.1), Managing Editor Frederic Murray discussed the inclusion of AIJ in a discoverable archiving system at Southwestern Oklahoma State University. Hopefully he will forgive me for stealing some of his thunder (I will leave the specifics to him), but through the analyses possible via that archiving system, we can assure you that AIJ is, in fact, an international journal with readership spanning not only disciplines, but also countries and continents.

Also in that letter, Frederic pointed out that we would be launching our first themed special section in a future edition. That future edition, Volume 7, Issue 1, is now our next edition. When we chose to focus on issues of racism, discrimination, privilege, and microaggression, we recognized the relevance of the topics without completely foreseeing the movement to the forefront of the national conversation that these issues would make. In a time when issues of bias and discrimination are being more openly (if not more reasonably) discussed, I am proud that AIJ will be involved in bringing a measured and academic perspective to that discourse. If you have relevant manuscripts in development, I would encourage you to consider our next edition as a place to share them with the world. Submissions to the special section are due by January 15th. Along with submissions for the special section, AIJ is also accepting manuscripts discussing the broader array of topics to which we are committed for the remainder of the next issue.

Jared F. Edwards, Ph.D. Editor-at-Large