European Journal of Psychotraumatology: One year later…

To share or not to share - 10 years of European Journal of Psychotraumatology

The European Journal of Psychotraumatology, owned by the European Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ESTSS), launched as one of the first full Open Access 'specialist' journals in its field. Has this Open Access model worked in how the Journal has performed? With the European Journal of Psychotraumatology celebrating its ten-year anniversary we look back at the past decade of sharing our research with the world and with how the journal sits with the broader movement beyond Open Access to Open Research and we present new policies we have adopted to move the field of psychotraumatology to the next level of Open Research. While we as researchers now make our publications more often freely available to all, how often do we share our protocols, our statistical analysis plans, or our data? We all gain from more transparency and reproducibility, and big steps are being made in this direction. The journal's decennial performance as well as the exciting new Open Research developments are presented in this editorial. The journal is no longer in its infancy and eager to step into the next decade of Open Research.

Psychotraumatology: rich in international and cross-cultural collaboration

Although European countries differ widely in their approach to psychotrauma and its consequences, with 20 years of European psychotraumatology in the form of the European Society for Traumatic Studies (ESTSS) there is now increasing dissemination of evidence-based care reaching more and more professionals and scholars in Europe. The society has moved forward to become a European umbrella organization serving many different European countries and cultures. This article describes the process of the restructuring and how ESTSS has grown from collaboration with other traumatic stress partners inside and outside Europe. The knowledge generated by The European Network for Traumatic Stress (TENTS) project has helped this process as well as the creation of an international open-access journal, the European Journal of Psychotraumatology (EJPT), for optimal dissemination of knowledge.

Bonding after trauma: on the role of social support and the oxytocin system in traumatic stress

This paper outlines the state of affairs in psychobiological research on psychotrauma and PTSD with a focus on the role of the oxytocin system in traumatic stress. With a high prevalence of trauma and PTSD in the Netherlands, new preventive and therapeutic interventions are needed. The focus is on the role of social support and bonding in coming to grips with psychological trauma, about the oxytocin system as a basis for reducing the stress response and creating a feeling of bonding, about binding words to painful emotions in psychotherapy, and about the bonds between researchers and clinicians.