IWA Publishing is pleased to announce that we are publishing a joint editorial from 21 editors across 14 journals who focus on hydrological research and practice (please see the reference and full list of journals represented at the bottom of the post). This is the result of a meeting held in April 2017 at the General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna, Austria. The meeting discussed the challenges of the changing publishing landscape and how the editor role can both work with the changes and evolve to ensure the continued output of high quality publications; enabling the continued facilitation of scientific advancement in the field. Nevil Wyndham Quinn, Editor-in-Chief of Hydrology Research, lead the author team who wrote the article.
"Invigorating Hydrological Research through Journal Publications" discusses questionable author, reviewer and editor practices in the peer review process, with the aim of providing a way to move on from them. Quinn et al. (2018) acknowledge the recent trend for institutionally-pressured faster publication speeds and how this can be seen to contribute to the premature publication of incremental contributions to the field Open Access and the sometimes controversial need to publish large open data sets, or the deliberate withholding of them, it can be difficult to confirm the novelty of new research. The editorial also considers the way that the rise in the number of contributors to new papers can lead to confusion about author attribution. Many of these issues can be resolved through the consideration of the significant role that journals play in terms of gatekeeping the publication process.
In regards to Hydrology Research and IWA Publishing, we are working towards developing new policies and improving old ones which will ensure the high quality publications that our authors and readers expect of the journal. These include:
- Since early 2017, all IWA Publishing journals request emailed co-author verification through the Editorial Manager system.
- Hydrology Research now requests the inclusion of an author attribution statement in all new submissions to the peer review process.
- As always, our editors and reviewers carefully check for novelty in new submissions.
- IWA Publishing is working closely with the editorial board to ensure that the reviewer pool is current, internationally representative, and covers all of the wider-reaching aspects of the hydrological field.
- The journal is also a hybrid Open Access journal, which means that authors have the choice between traditional publication and OA. IWA Publishing also offers waivers through the Research4Life programme to those researchers from lower income countries.
You can read the full Open Access editorial online here and it will be in print in Hydrology Research 49(6).
Emma Buckingham
Editorial Assistant, IWA Publishing
Reference:
Nevil Quinn, Günter Blöschl, András Bárdossy, Attilio Castellarin, Martyn Clark, Christophe Cudennec, Demetris Koutsoyiannis, Upmanu Lall, Lubomir Lichner, Juraj Parajka, Christa D. Peters-Lidard, Graham Sander, Hubert Savenije, Keith Smettem, Harry Vereecken, Alberto Viglione, Patrick Willems, Andy Wood, Ross Woods, Chong-Yu Xu, Erwin Zehe; "Joint Editorial: Invigorating hydrological research through journal publications". Hydrology Research nh2018124. doi: https://doi.org/10.2166/nh.2018.124
The full list of journals represented at the meeting and with whom the Editorial is published in conjunction with:
Hydrology and Earth System Sciences
Journal of Hydrology and Hydromechanics
Proceedings of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences
Physics and Chemistry of the Earth
Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies
