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Why Subscribe to Open?

One of our core missions at IWA Publishing is to advance scholarship and disseminate knowledge. As such, we have transitioned our entire portfolio to Open Access via a 'Subscribe to Open' model.

Subscribe to Open (S2O) is a community-approach Open Access model that relies on the continued support of libraries and members subscriptions to ensure the sustainability of our journals. Only through full support from our partners will we be able to achieve Open Access for our journals. 

The ability to publish OA is not limited to authors with sufficient funds as we offer generous waivers for authors in countries with which we have a waiver agreement/policy. In addition, we maintain that librarian selection plays an important role in the curation of content for researchers and so we support approaches that preserve their role in the process in addition to those intermediaries, such as subscription agents, who reduce related administrative burdens.

Subscribe to Open is a compelling model because it seeks to take what is good and working well in the current system and applies it to achieving a sustainable and more universal model of Open Access across publications and publishers of all sizes.

 

The impact of supporting Open Access 

From extensive feedback from academic institutions, development bodies, and both government and private organisations around the world, we are highly conscious of the need to share best practice in water publishing. 

This is particularly important in lower- and middle-income (LMIC) countries where budgets have not previously allowed subscriptions, but where the need for better water and wastewater policy is acute. 

With Open Access, everyone benefits – especially those end-users most in need of access to stable, clean and reliable water supplies; schools, NGOs, local governments, farming collectives and smaller-scale manufacturers. Open Access also allows for the reuse and dissemination of the research in any form, which means that it can be translated freely, shared and understood by even the most remote corners of the globe. Through Open Access anyone, anywhere will have unrestricted access to IWA Publishing's seminal water research.

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