Open Access Journals for Water and Wastewater
This post is a short list of open-access journals in the fields of wastewater and water treatment and quality.
Open-access journals follow a publishing model where content is made freely available to readers (often there is a fee for the researchers publishing in them). Although it is not without weaknesses of its own (e.g. unethical researchers could boost their publication count by finding journals with low standards that will publish anything as long as they get paid), I find this publishing model to have some valuable advantages over the more traditional model where subscribers/readers pay. The big advantage is that they have a much wider potential audience; people who aren't at an institution such as a university that has a lot of journal subscriptions definitely run into affordability issues with closed/controlled-access journals. The benefits of this broader access run both ways: working professionals can do their jobs better with access to the latest research in their field, and researchers can get the benefit of feedback, and possibly citations (at industry conferences, etc.), from a wider group than just other researchers.
With that introduction out of the way, here are some open-access journals in the field of water and wastewater treatment (or with some relevance to the field) that I've come across:
- Drinking Water Engineering and Science
- Water
- The Open Environmental Engineering Journal
- OMICS Publishing has a couple of journals that have some overlap with the water and wastewater field: Journal of Chemical Engineering & Process Technology and Journal of Civil & Environmental Engineering
- Frontiers In Environmental Science and Frontiers In Microbiology also have some relevant articles.
- Nature's Scientific Reports covers all sorts of topics.
- Applied and Environmental Microbiology has a delayed public access policy.
- Environmental Science & Technology also has options for making articles accessible.
A lot of these publishers also have open access journals on other topics.