The Journal of Water Reuse and Desalination (JWRD) has been established since 2011, and has successfully grown in popularity as a leading publisher of scientific articles on management, sustainability and application of water reuse and desalination. In order to further increase our readership and disseminate the research outcomes more broadly, JWRD is going to become Open Access in 2017.
By going Open Access, the published articles will be available free of charge to everyone who has internet access, making them available to the world rather than just the subscribers of the journal. This will increase the visibility of published articles and allow them to be more easily accessed and cited, enabling them to have greater impact. Publication in such a manner has also become a requirement of many funding organisations in North America, Europe and the UK, a policy in most of the UN organisations, as well as many leading universities (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-access_mandate#Instances). It is also part of an increasing trend globally to make research outcomes freely available so that the research can be more easily built upon. Articles that are published prior to 2017 will also be made Open Access in 2017, helping to increase their visibility.
While increasing the ability of the global community to have access to JWRD articles by moving JWRD to Open Access publication, the journal will ensure that the quality of published articles is maintained. This will be achieved by retaining the current rigorous peer review process to ensure only articles worthy of publication are accepted, and that authors receive valuable feedback on their manuscripts prior to publication. This will ensure that the high quality and reputation of IWA Publishing journals is well maintained, and readers and authors can have confidence in the quality of articles published.
The change will also mean that authors are required to pay for publishing their accepted articles rather than the readers. JWRD will have a low Article Processing Charge of only US$850 (with conversions available for payment in GB£ and €), payable only if the article has been accepted for publication. There will be no submission charges. If the author is from a Research4Life listed country (low income country: http://www.research4life.org/), the publication fee will automatically be waived during the online submission process. We believe that these competitive publication rates and fee waivers for authors from Research4Life listed countries should further increase JWRD's attractiveness.
The move to Open Access publication is an exciting time for the journal, and the Editors of JWRD look forward to your continued support for what should be a positive change for both our authors and readers alike.
The Editors of Journal of Water Reuse and Desalination:
Blanca Jiménez Cisneros
UNESCO,
France
Jörg E. Drewes
Technical University of Munich,
Germany
Stephen Gray
Victoria University,
Australia
In S. Kim
Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology,
Korea
How Yong Ng
National University of Singapore,
Singapore
