Seasons Greetings from Shirin Heidari, RHM Director and Editor

With the Holiday Season upon us, I want to reflect on the year that has passed and those who have made our progress and success possible.

2015 marked the transition to a new era for RHM. There has been a change in leadership, with Marge Berer handing over responsibility for the organisation to me. This transition coincided with the move of our journal to online-only publication, and the launch of a new RHM website and enhanced presence on social media. Our commitment and dedication to sexual and reproductive health and rights remains, however, unchanged and as strong as ever.

This year we continued disseminating high-quality SRHR evidence and amplifying the voices of advocates and women from around the world. The 45th journal issue on ‘Knowledge, evidence, practice and power’, which I co-edited with Marge, scrutinised the creation of evidence and how it forms the basis of our knowledge – while drawing attention to the numerous political, social, economic and ideological factors that influence the knowledge creation pathway. We also continued to focus on controversial topics. In the wake of the newly approved Sustainable Development Goals, our latest issue on ‘Sexuality,  sexual rights and sexual politics’ brings together a number of papers on sexual rights which remains a contentious subject in political spheres, where conservative ideologies and backwards policies fail to address these rights, especially for men and women in marginalised populations.

In 2015, we also collaborated with WHO on publication of the supplement on Medical Abortion, adding to the evidence on barriers to access; and highlighting the importance of efforts to expand access to this safe and easy to scale-up intervention that could meet women’s needs and reduce the mortality and morbidity caused by unsafe abortion. We continue to expand our reach thanks to the tireless efforts of our extended teams in Beijing, Cairo, Lima, Moscow, New Delhi and Recife who have ensured the translation and dissemination of important evidence into Chinese, Arabic, Spanish, Russian, Hindi and Portuguese.  Production of a new French issue is also under way.

Our success and progress are made possible by the continuing contributions and support of our authors, peer-reviewers, readers, our global teams, editorial board members, trustees, and dedicated staff team, and last but not least by the generous support of our donors, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the John D and Catherine T Macarthur Foundation in 2015. You are making RHM truly global and your commitment gives us a reason to continue our efforts to strive for a world where universal access to and respect for sexual and reproductive health and rights prevails.

We have truly valued your support and contributions to RHM during the past year and we look forward to new opportunities in the year to come.

We wish you joy, health and happiness in the year ahead.