The World Bank lists 28 countries as low income, with a further 108 in the lower-middle and upper-middle income categories.¹ Together these low- and middle-income areas include more than 60% of the world’s countries and more than 80% of the world’s population. Research on mental health, however, is still overwhelmingly funded and conducted in high-income countries by researchers from the global north, and publications from these areas are prioritized and promoted by publishers and scholarly indexes.

The Society for Mental Health in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (SoMHiL) was established to help redress this imbalance in international psychiatric research, to bring research from and about low- and middle-income countries (LAMIC) to a global readership. SoMHiL also recognizes that mental wellbeing and access to mental health care, as well as the symptoms, diagnosis and management of mental illness, can be affected by cultural context.

For eighteen years SoMHiL has published psychiatric research exploring mental health issues in LAMIC in the internationally recognized Open Journal of Psychiatry & Allied Sciences (OJPAS®). Reception of this journal and its research has been overwhelmingly positive. As a result, SoMHiL has decided to expand their publishing portfolio with this gateway, offering authors across LAMIC and non-LAMIC countries a new opportunity to publish their psychiatric research for a global audience.

The SoMHiL Gateway is an open research venue, offering rapid publication with links to underlying data and open, post-publication peer review. At the forefront of open scholarship, the Gateway welcomes articles that originate from low- or middle-income countries or consider mental health issues relevant to these regions. As an open access venue, the SoMHiL Gateway serves as a forum for all those interested in reading and sharing knowledge about mental health, clinical psychology, psychiatry, psychiatric social work, psychiatric nursing, and allied sciences.

While authors from around the world are eligible to submit to the Gateway, F1000 and SoMHiL recognize that open access article publication charges (APCs) can pose a particular challenge for researchers from LAMIC. The gateway, like all of F1000Research, uses criteria set by the World Bank to offer full or partial waivers to authors from low- and middle-income countries. In addition, the SoMHiL Gateway also subsidizes corresponding authors from India, who are eligible for a reduced APC of $650. You can read more about F1000’s approach to APCs here.

The SoMHiL Gateway marks an exciting new direction for the Society, and we hope you will consider supporting this new venture into open research. If you have questions about the Gateway or would like to submit an article, please contact us at publishing@F1000.com.

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