The functions of a journal

After two years as Editors, we are half way through the term of our appointments. At this stage in our tenure, we would like to reflect on some of the considerations that now go into our decision-making processes. Clearly, our primary commitment is to contribute to the health of the public in Australia and New Zealand, but there are many other initiatives that contribute to this in a more direct and substantial way. The Journal’s function is to support those initiatives by helping to develop a critical and well-trained public health workforce and to generate a substantial research base for practitioners and policy makers. Given that the Journal is the single biggest financial commitment of the PHAA, it is worth making explicit where our focus has been in the past year, and to suggest changes for 2003 and raise a troublesome issue that has arisen in the course of the past year.