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Publications and Communications Board (P&CB)

Graham Davey (Chair, Publications and Communications Board)

2007 has been an exciting and productive year for the Publications & Communications Board. During the year, one of the main tasks for the Board has been to review its public engagement strategy, and this has resulted in changes to the criteria for the Board’s public engagement grants to allow funding of more substantial projects that will have a lasting impact in their areas of engagement.

2007 has also seen the first year of the Top Sante project, in which the Society is collaborating to produce a series of accessible psychology-based supplements in the magazine Top Sante. Indications are that this project is engaging readers with useful evidence-based information about how psychology can help daily living. The Psychologist continues from strength to strength, providing a wealth of articles and comment on contemporary issues relevant to both academic and professional psychologists. We look forward to the redesign that is due in early 2008.

Another of the great successes of the previous few years has been the Research Digest, which now brings highlights of cutting-edge psychological research to over 21,000 subscribers.

Much of what the Society attempts to achieve in its response to government and non-government consultations would be impossible without the work of the Policy Support Unit (PSU) and the Parliamentary Office. The PSU continues to increase the number of responses to consultations it coordinates each year, and one of the main achievements of the Parliamentary Office this year has been its involvement in lobbying for the passing of the new Mental Health Act.

Another aspect of the Society's work that often goes unnoticed is that of the PR Unit and the Press Committee, but it is thanks to these groups that the profession and discipline of psychology still has such a high profile in the media generally. In 2007, the PR Unit has also been highly instrumental in facilitating communications strategy and overseeing the development and restructuring of the Society’s website.

The BPS-Blackwell imprint also continues to expand its portfolio of books with the strategic aim of providing exciting and accessible texts across all core areas of psychology for all levels of study.

Finally, 2007 also saw the highly successful launch of a new Society journal (the Journal of Neuropsychology) with a healthy core of subscriptions. We look forward to another successful year for all Society journals in 2008.

The Psychologist and Psychologist Appointments

Another year and another twelve issues of The Psychologist, in print and online with extras. Topics covered this year ranged from binge drinking to preventing falls, from exercise to torture, from happiness at work to retirement, from yaks to alopecia, from gist memory to... well, you get the idea. Special issues covered capitalism and control, moving beyond diagnosis, and nurturing the next generation.

In addition to this 'business as usual', the main agenda for the Psychologist Team and Psychologist Policy Committee has been the redesign of The Psychologist. The redesign aims to celebrate the unusual nature of The Psychologist, by cementing a clear design distinction between 'expert', peer-reviewed articles, 'society' news and information, and the more personal pieces. We have included 'take home' messages for busy readers in a form which can also be extracted by online citation databases, which will increase the impact of the articles.

As well as improving existing formats, a range of new sections have also been introduced. These emphasise the common roots of the readership through aspects like methods, teaching and learning, and history. Finally, the positioning of the call for contributions on the inside front cover confirms the importance of the reader in the make-up of The Psychologist - it remains your publication, there are a range of very good reasons why you should write for it and a supportive team to help you do so.

The integration of The Psychologist and Psychologist Appointments, although partly a financial decision, serves to complete The Psychologist as a one-stop shop for news, features, reviews, careers and much more. We hope you will take a fresh look at The Psychologist and see an engaging, professional and informative publication of which you can be proud.

Research Digest

The Society celebrated the 100th issue of its free, fortnightly Research Digest e-mail service with a special feature on 'the most important psychology experiment never done'. Contributions from top psychologists and bloggers ensured it was well received by the 21,000 subscribers. It also featured prominently on the associated Research Digest blog - this side of the Research Digest has really taken off, and is attracting thousands of visits a day.

Discussions with A Level exam boards are leading to creative ways to promote the service (and the Society) to the core audience of students.

The Digest has proved to be an extremely successful and popular way of fulfilling the Royal Charter objective of the dissemination of a knowledge of psychology pure and applied, but this is just the beginning.

Public Engagement

The Society’s most ambitious public engagement project this year was the psychology-based 'Happy New You' supplement in the Top Sante magazine. So far two supplements have been produced, proving extremely popular with readers and taking psychology to a far wider audience than has been possible in the past. Two further supplements are planned for 2008.

The criteria for public engagement grants was changed for 2007, removing the £3k ceiling and concentrating on projects producing sustainable resources. The total grants budget was £14k and two projects were chosen:

1. Offender profiling and Beyond: Forensic and Investigative Psychology
   Grant recipient - David Canter
   Grant amount - £7,434
   A series of six country-wide, one-day interactive events, held in partnership with the International Academy of Investigative Psychology and Liverpool University. Aimed at Sixth form Psychology students and supported by a booklet and a website.
   Events are taking place during the Winter of 2007 and the spring/summer of 2008.
   
   
2. Employment and employability for psychology graduates
   Grant recipient - Dominic Upton and Peter Reddy
   Grant amount - £6,000
   An interactive video production about the employment, and employability, of psychology graduates. This is to be streamed through the Society’s website, other online sources and also be available as a DVD for institutional use.
   
   It is anticipated that the project will go live in the late spring/early summer of 2008.

On 11 October, the annual British Academy/British Psychological Society Joint lecture took place. The lecture was delivered by Professor Robin Dunbar of the Institute of Cognitive & Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford. The event was a total sell-out, with many people having to be turned away at the door. The lecture was extremely well received, and overall it was a very interesting and successful evening. A copy of the audio lecture and Professor Dunbar’s PowerPoint slides are now available.

Policy Support Unit

The Policy Support Unit (PSU) works closely with the Society’s Boards, Divisions, Special Groups, Branches, Sections and individual members, to coordinate the preparation of all Society responses to relevant consultations on public policy across the UK. As part of this role, the PSU provides support and guidance for members contributing to consultation responses on the Society’s behalf.

108 responses were submitted during the first ten months of 2007 and a further 9 were under preparation at the time of going to press, each representing a unique opportunity to provide evidence based material to influence social policy and raise the profile of the Society.

All members are eligible to contribute to responses and any interest is warmly welcomed - further information can be obtained from the PSU (e-mail: psu@bps.org.uk; +44 (0)116 252 9926/9577). Full details of both active and completed consultations, including the Society’s responses, are available. Some examples illustrating the importance of this area of activity are detailed below:

1. Implementation of European Directive 2005/36/EC for Health & Social Care Professions in the UK (Department of Health)
   The Society’s response emphasised issues of public protection and confirmed that migrant professionals wishing to provide services on a temporary or occasional basis, should be required to register with the host competent authority and provide the maximum information allowed by the Directive as to their legal and professional status. The importance of checks on the qualifications of those providing such services in any field of psychology (not just clinical) was emphasised.
   
   
2. Review of Science in the Home Office (Office of Science and Innovation)
   The Society’s response recommended: the adoption of a peer-reviewed, open competition, responsive-mode funding model; a greater emphasis on reviewing and harnessing existing research work; and the development of a more effective policy to foster the dissemination of Home Office research through standard academic routes. The response also identified a need for clearer and more effective publication policies to improve the coordination of knowledge transfer across the various bodies falling within the Home Office’s remit.
   
   
3. Acute Inpatient Services Review (Healthcare Commission; HCC)
   The HCC originally failed to take account of the Society’s response to this consultation. However, after a coordinated follow-up from the PSU and those members involved in the initial consultation, it has now been agreed that the Society will engage with the outcome assessment steering and clinical practice sub-groups of the HCC’s acute inpatient service review programme. The Society will also be working with the HCC on several key issues, including: the drafting of the report of the Acute Services Review; the development of remedial action for any identified poorly performing Trusts, the development and analysis of the HCC’s staff and service-user surveys and the auditing of the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme.

Parliament

During the past year, the Parliamentary Office has continued to deliver projects in the three core areas of activities: co-ordinating psychological evidence for parliamentarians and policy makes; assisting in managing a Society fellowship in Parliament with the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST); and organising and hosting Parliamentary seminars, as well as monitoring all areas of policy that may be of interest/relevance to the membership.

During 2007, the Society’s Parliamentary Office has been extremely active in securing the passing of the new Mental Health Act, and continues to be engaged in all other activities related to the implementation of this key piece of legislation. The Office has also continued to be active in advising the membership in all aspects related to Parliamentary Select Committee inquiries, from the submission of written memoranda, to the effective performance as oral witnesses.

The Society recently hosted, together with POST, a Parliamentary Seminar on the topical issue of Changing Health Behaviours. The meeting, Chaired by Lord Rea (Chair of the Parliamentary Food & Health Forum), included presentations from Professor Mike Kelly (Director of the Centre of Public Health Excellence at NICE), Professor Robert West (Professor of Health Psychology and Director of Tobacco Studies at the Cancer Research UK Health Behaviour Research Centre, University College London), and Dr. Karen Jochelson (Research Fellow in Policy at the King’s Fund, leading the Fund’s public health work programme).

The seminar was designed to accompany the publication of the POSTNote briefing on Health Behaviour, written by a Wellcome Trust funded postgraduate student in Health Psychology. It involved short presentations (10 minutes each) by three different speakers. The talks opened a general discussion, followed by a small reception, which allowed interested parties to continue their conversations in a more informal manner.

Health behaviours such as smoking cessation, moderation of alcohol intake, healthy eating and physical activity can have a major impact on health outcomes including rates of cancer, heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Recent policy documents, including the Wanless Reports and the 2004 White Paper Choosing Health, have emphasised the importance of the promotion of good health and the prevention of illness. However, increasing public awareness of the benefits of engaging in health behaviours does not maximise the uptake of such behaviours. It is evident that their initiation and maintenance is the result of a complex interaction of social, biological, environmental and psychological factors. The POSTNote briefing examined the characteristics of successful health behaviour change interventions and analysed the challenges to such health behaviour change at both the individual and the population levels.

The Parliamentary Office is currently actively planning similar events on two separate topics: alternatives to custodial sentencing; and eating disorders.

The Parliamentary Office works very closely with other policy systems within the Society, such as the Policy Support Unit, and the Policy Advisers to all the different Boards and Committees. Additionally, close collaboration is also established with the Society’s offices in the devolved nations, which will undoubtedly see an increase in their respective political activity following recent political developments.

All this strategic activity ensures that substantive messages are delivered to a whole range of political audiences in a coordinated and consistent manner, enforcing the strength of the advice at each particular step.

The Parliamentary Office will soon be launching a fellowship scheme, similar to the one operated with POST, which will allow for expansion of some of these core activities.

Journals

The Society's journals operation has had another successful year, managing to maintain gross income at around £1.1m with an ever growing proportion of subscriptions converting to online only access.

Part 1 of the Journal of Neuropsychology was successfully launched at the annual conference in April and we have seen a healthy interest and a steadily rising number of subscriptions.

The British Journal of Educational Psychology published the fourth and fifth in its monograph series: Student Learning and University Teaching (Number 4) and Learning through Digital Technologies (Number 5). The British Journal of Developmental Psychology celebrated 25 years of publishing with a special editorial featuring in Part 1, 2007.

We have a number of special issues planned for 2008:

• British Journal of Health Psychology: Expressive writing (February)
• Journal of Neuropsychology: Face processing (March)
• British Journal of Health Psychology: Therapeutic techniques for interventions based on Leventhal's self-regulatory model (May)
• Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology: Innovations in the study of the work-family interface (June)
• Psychology and Psychotherapy: Implementing clinical regulations in everyday practices (September)

Operationally, the Journals team has been involved in setting up a new free trial facility for institutional subscribers as well as commissioning a brand new production tracking programme. We have also undertaken research in the Chinese market; interest is high and we are planning a number of follow-up initiatives for 2008.

Public Relations and Press Committee

The Public Relations Team and Press Committee have been involved in a great deal of communications work this year, raging from media work to promote research published at the Society’s many conferences to internal communications advice to assist with office restructuring and the restructuring and refreshing of the Society’s website.

Feedback from the many journalists the office comes into contact with suggests the Society is held in high esteem, both for its reactive service which puts the media in touch with relevant experts and for the many stories we proactively send to them in the form of the 600-plus news releases issued annually. Archive copies of these can be viewed in the Society’s online Media Centre, as can some of the more recent coverage.

A huge debt of gratitude goes to the many members who work with the PR Team, either on the experts database, waiting for a call from the media, or from the many members who have had their work news released over the course of the year.

Many, of course, have the benefit of having undertaken the Society’s media training, either on our centrally run courses or on the bespoke courses now offered to the various member networks, and these skills have come to the fore in support not just of one off interviews but also for larger projects such as the tie in with Top Sante magazine.

Finally a word from the Press Committee who provide the psychological expertise and advice to the communications staff in the office. New members joined during the year and the Committee assumed a new chair in Fiona Jones. Their involvement gives the Society’s PR operation a potent mix of professional PR skill and credible scientific knowledge.

BPS Blackwell Books

The books publishing wing of the BPS is run through the BPS Blackwell imprint; a collaboration with Wiley-Blackwell.

2007 has been a successful year for the imprint, seeing the publication of two new titles for the flagship textbook series of ‘BPS Textbooks in Psychology’; Personality and Individual Differences by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic; and a new edition of Introduction to Social Psychology edited by Miles Hewstone, Wolfgang Stroebe and Klaus Jonas. More titles in this series for core modules on undergraduate degrees will publish over the coming years, eventually building up to from a comprehensive library of texts for the Society's syllabus.

2007 has also seen the publication of Psychological Testing by Dave Bartram and Patricia Lindley; a comprehensive package of materials for the BPS Level A Test Administration Open Learning Programme.

Mark Forshaw’s Easy Statistics in Psychology is a new title in our series of BPS Student Guides and provides an accessible and enjoyable introduction to using statistics.

2008 looks set to be another exciting year, with highlights including further textbooks such as Graham Davey’s Psychopathology; Kate Cain’s An Introduction to Reading Development and Reading Difficulties; and David Hardman’s Judgment and Decision-Making.

Anyone interested in contributing to the list, should contact the Commissioning Editor, Andrew McAleer (e-mail: andrew.mcaleer@oxon.blackwellpublishing.com). All titles are assessed and evaluated by the BPS-Blackwell Editorial Strategy Group.

All titles are available to members on the BPS-Blackwell website at discounted rates.