In keeping with the ethics of this special issue, we sought to attract academic papers of the same quality and integrity as those published regularly in the journal, the key differentiation being that a person with lived experience of social work had to be the lead or solo author.

The vast majority of academic papers accepted for peer-reviewed social work journals are from practising academics, with very few practitioners, and even less people with lived experience, managing to have their views heard from such platforms. Writing and presenting an academic paper to a peer-reviewed journal can be an arduous task, shrouded in mystery and labyrinthine processes for those attempting a first effort. Academic journals have extremely specific protocols, systems of reviewing, referencing and using language that can be quite off-putting to newcomers. Worse still is the negative tone and content of feedback that most academics have received at some time in their career in respect of their submissions. As an editorial team, we were determined to avoid any such culture of negative criticism and set ourselves the goal of always giving positive, constructive criticism, even when we had made the decision not to accept a paper. Such an approach included advising about where the article might perhaps be better received, or whether perhaps it could be presented in a different format. Rather than always communicating via the formal online journal platform, editors used e-mails and other platforms to communicate issues in ways that encouraged the authors to continue working on a paper. Again, we were at all times aware of boundary issues and checked out such practices at our regular online and WhatsApp meetings.