Päätoimittajalta

Abstrakti

This is the second issue of Neuropsy Open, a new online publication at the University of Helsinki, Finland. The articles are and will be mostly in Finnish with a few exceptions. Still, we want to introduce the journal also to potential international visitors.

The Finnish Specialisation Programme in Neuropsychology has been running at the University of Helsinki, Finland, since 1997.  Up until 2015 the students produced theses that reported empirical studies conducted in research groups all over Finland. The programme was linked with a degree called ’licentiate in psychology’, which in Finland is a degree between the master’s and the doctorate. Most papers were published in either Finnish or international peer-reviewed journals. With the new legislation, licentiate degrees were no longer awarded to the students of the specialisation programme and the thesis grew smaller in terms of the required workload and the ECTS. Publishing them in scientific journals became more infrequent.

The papers are clinically highly relevant, however, as they seek to answer questions arising from the neuropsychological practice the students are involved in. Some papers still report results from empirical research, but the majority are systematic or scoping reviews of current neuropsychological literature. As we believe clinicians working in the field will benefit from the topical reviews, we wanted to bring them available to wider audiences instead of burying them in the closed learning platforms of the university.  

Hence, Neuropsy Open, an open access electronic journal focusing on publishing the thesis papers from the Specialisation Programme in Neuropsychology. Other content currently includes editorial pics of recent doctoral theses and master’s theses relevant to clinical neuropsychology. In the future, other article types may be considered as well. The editor team is teachers and researchers of clinical neuropsychology, at the Department of psychology and logopedics.

The first issue of Neuropsy Open included articles on adult neuropsychology. This issue has articles on child neuropsychology.