Water Quality Research Journal is changing, and changing for the better. Ten articles from the journal in each of 2019, 2020 and 2021 will be made Open Access, readable by anyone, thanks to the generous financial support of the Canadian Association on Water Quality/L'Association canadienne sur la qualité de l'eau (CAWQ/ACQE). WQRJ has been the official journal of CAWQ/ACQE since its launch over 50 years ago. We are very grateful to CAWQ/ACQE for this assistance. Our intention is for the journal to become fully Open Access from 2022 onwards.
A full list of the editor-selected articles already made Open Access from the 2019 volume can be found at the end of this Editorial. Details of the 2020 and 2021 OA articles will be released as future issues are published. Of course, in addition to the editor-selected OA papers, authors can make their articles Open Access through payment of the journal's Article Processing Charge (APC).
Open Access is an excellent way of increasing the reach of the articles we publish. For example, Edgar Tovilla and Kernaghan Webb's 2017 WQRJ article, ‘Examining the emerging environmental protection policy convergence in the Ontario municipal drinking water, wastewater and stormwater sectors’ has been downloaded more than 3,800 times since WQRJ moved on to the Silverchair journal platform in July 2018. That is more readership for a single article than the entire journal achieved in a year a decade ago. This is real progress.
In addition to the Open Access articles made possible by CAWQ/ACQE, all WQRJ articles from 2017 and before are free to access. That is 41 years of high quality research, available for free.
The journal itself continues to evolve and improve. Whilst retaining its strong Canadian base, WQRJ is becoming much more international. The 2019 volume contained articles from researchers in 15 countries across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. In the same year, articles from the journal were downloaded by readers in 164 different countries, covering every continent except Antarctica. Twenty-two of these countries are Francophone. WQRJ is now a truly international outlet for high quality research.
We end where we started. Water Quality Research Journal is changing, and changing for the better. Join us and spread the word about the journal's move to openness so that researchers around the world can benefit from the many excellent articles that WQRJ publishes.
L'avenir est prometteur. L'avenir est ouvert!
