TY - JOUR JF - isssp JO - JSP VL - 5 IS - 1 PY - 2023 Y1 - 2023/3/01 TI - A new year, a new hope TT - N2 - 2023 has finally arrived, a new year which I do hope brings peace to people all over the world. At the Journal of Suicide Prevention (JSP) we celebrate our fifth anniversary. With a renowned editorial board, we started our journey in 2019 (1) when the COVID-19 pandemic had just started to ravage the blue planet. We witnessed how this pandemic substantially changed our life and how scientists from different disciplines tried to study its diverse consequences on human behavior, including suicide (2-5). In terms of suicide prevention, in 2021 the International Association of Suicide Prevention (IASP) launched the Regional Suicide Prevention Networks Programme (RSPNP), with the aim of promoting the sharing of expert knowledge, skills and experience, across all borders, thereby contributing to the effective planning, implementation and evaluation of national suicide prevention strategies (6). The RSPNP, now known as the Partnerships for Life (P4L) programme, is now making substantial progress across all regions of the world, having completed scoping and planning stages and moving into full implementation from this year. I firmly believe that this initiative has the potential to make a significant contribution to the development and delivery of a more effective and strategic approach to suicide prevention on a global scale. Last year, as the editor in chief of the JSP, I became aware of a new phenomenon which I would like to share with readers. I received two separate submissions from two different countries which I sent to reviewers after initial (positive) assessment. Subsequently, I sent reviewers’ comments to the authors and passed the authors’ revised versions back to the reviewers. This standard cycle continued until the reviewers were satisfied with the final version of the manuscripts and I issued the acceptance letters. Unexpectedly, however, the corresponding authors of both manuscripts asked to withdraw their submissions, with the excuse of “needing to conduct more analyses”! I do not have a firm explanation of this behaviour. I can only assume that the authors wanted to test our journal as it is a relative newcomer in the field and were not really committing to publishing their papers with us. I refer to this phenomenon as a “testing” submission which, of course, is of concern because we have limited human and financial resources. Having mentioned this experience, I would like to encourage authors to send us more “real”, rather than “testing”, submissions. The JSP is a platform dedicated to suicide prevention and we especially welcome submissions from colleagues in low- and middle-income countries (LaMICs). SP - 1 EP - 2 AU - Rezaeian, M. AD - KW - COVID-19 KW - platform UR - http://isssp.ir/article-1-49-en.html ER -