Ask the Editor:
Professor Stephen Gray, Editor for the Journal of Water Reuse & Desalination
Why is Journal of Water Reuse & Desalination (JWRD) important to the field?
JWRD is an Open Access journal and so is able to freely distribute advances in water recycling and desalination to all parts of the world, so it is a means to provide access to leading water research to global communities. This is an important feature of JWRD, as part of the brief was to attract interest from developing countries/communities.
It also accepts many papers from developing and emerging countries (e.g. China and India as well as African countries). This is important for developing water research capacity in these countries and for improving the quality of this research. The large and growing communities in these countries means they have water issues and also they will be important parts of the water research community in years to come.
What ongoing/upcoming trend or development do you think will be a game changer for the field?
The topics of increasing interest are: direct potable reuse, industrial water treatment and resource recovery. These are of interest in Western communities and also for developing countries. Some developing countries also seem to be looking at lower technology solutions for water treatment as the financial capacity is not there to pay for high end technology. I think the price of membrane treatment is coming down, particularly with cheaper membranes coming out of China and India, so these technologies will be more universal across the globe. It would be interesting to have some more articles on low cost membrane treatment processes.
What would you say is the most challenging thing about changing to an Open Access (OA) only publication journal after years of a more traditional publication style?
Charging for publication is a concept that researchers need to adjust to. This means that researchers need to have funds to cover publication costs, whereas paying for access to journals usually comes from a common university/organisation account. Hence at the researcher level it is quite a change. Some universities are putting aside funds to cover publications costs, but usually target high ranking journals. I think the research industry is adjusting to paying for publication for OA. Our university has an agreement with some OA publishers and puts aside funds to cover publication costs in OA journals from some publishers, and in return we have some reduction in costs or have some additional publications.
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