About the Journal
Focus and Scope
The International Journal of Water Governance (IJWG) aims to be an important source of knowledge on governance in the domain of water and water-related issues, and an inspiration for professionals to understand and improve the governance capacity in their domains. In order to achieve this two-sided ambition we combine topical theoretical issues of governance, institutions, organizations and management with topical issues of water supply, drought, water quality and flood protection. From a variety of disciplines, we gather insights on what constitutes governance capacity with regards to environmental protection, stakeholder engagement, risk assessment, water allocation, participatory planning, information management, technology assessment, water ethics and policy development.
IJWG promotes investigation of actual practices of water governance; unravelling the drivers, processes and effects of the implementation of water policies. The scientific disciplines we cover in IJWG are public administration, management, law, sociology, planning, policy studies, innovation studies and interdisciplinary environmental sciences. Furthermore, we urge for contributions that combine disciplinary contributions in order to achieve an interdisciplinary approach of water governance. We expect that academics as well as professionals in the field can play an important role in these processes of transforming high quality disciplinary knowledge sources into integrated knowledge leading to innovations and improvements in water governance systems all over the world.
In addition to full research articles, we open the floor to Perspectives, which may highlight new developments and research agenda's, Commentaries and Practitioner Outlooks. These may be opinionated and will not be reviewed for scientific rigor, but for quality and factuality, and absence of obvious (commercial or ideological) bias. We accept empirical, theoretical or review-based Research Articles (7000 words), Perspectives (5000 words), Commentaries (3000 words) and Practitioner Outlooks (3000 words). For more information our submission guidelines.
We also welcome Special Issues (a minimum of 6 accepted contributions) or Special Section (a minimum of 3 accepted contributions) proposals. Articles will be published once accepted; they will not have to await acceptance of all contributions. For SIs, contact the Editor-in-Chief or one of the co-editors.
This journal is a continuation of the IJWG journal previously published by Erasmus University Rotterdam, and currently a co-production of Wageningen University, TU Delft and Deltares.
Ethics Statement
Authors published in the International Journal of Water Governance certify that their works are original and their own. The editors certify that all materials, with the possible exception of editorial introductions, book reviews, and some types of commentary, have been subjected to (double)-blind peer review by qualified scholars in the field. While the publishers and the editorial board make every effort to see that no inaccurate or misleading data, opinions, or statements appear in this journal, they wish to make clear that the data and opinions appearing in the articles herein are the sole responsibility of the contributor concerned. Editorial Board members, the institutes involved and any sponsors we may welcome will have no veto on the content of the journal, and membership of the Editorial Board does not imply agreement of the published papers nor endorsement of the authors.
Article Processing Charges
Publishing in IJWG is completely free, so neither Submission Charges nor Article Processing Charge are required from the authors. The resources needed to run the journal are covered by the institutions where the (associate) editors are employed, mostly in the form of time invested.
Open Access Policy
The International Journal of Water Governance is an open access journal published with a CC BY 4.0 license. This means that all published content is available without paywalls. Anyone is free to share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work), to remix (to adapt the work) for non-commercial purposes, under the following conditions:
- The original authors must be given credit
- For any reuse or distribution it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are
- Any of these conditions can be waived if the copyright holders give permission
- Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the author's moral rights
Copyright Policy
- Authors retain their copyrights.
- If you are using published images, text or other materials, be aware of copyright regulations. The TU Delft Copyright helpdesk can provide further information and answer your copyright questions.
- In case of (alleged or proven) copyright breaches or scientific misconduct (e.g. fabricating data), IJWG will follow the guidelines developed by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)
Review Policy
IJWG follows a single anonymous review process. Submissions are subject to an internal scan for relevance and coherence (which may lead to a request to revise and resubmit). Once internally accepted for review, they are assigned to a responsible editor who will send the manuscript for review to a minimum of two external reviewers. Reviewers are generally given a month to submit their review. Please be mindful that experience has shown that turnaround can take longer when reviewers run into delays or fail to make good on their promise.
Based on the reviewers' recommendations, the responsible (co-)editor will decide on acceptance, minor revisions, major revisions or rejection. A maximum of two rounds of revisions will be permitted. As soon as an article has been accepted and a DOI assigned, the article can be published, even if it is part of a larger Special Issue.
Research Data
TU Delft OPEN Publishing strongly supports that the data underlying the journals are archived in a recognised research data repository in line with the TU Delft Research Data Framework Policy and will support data citation. More information on policies.
Research Software
TU Delft OPEN Publishing strongly encourages the adoption of the TU Delft Research Software Policy. This policy facilitates best practices on management and sharing of research software and facilitates proper recognition of the contribution of TU Delft researchers to software.
Publication Ethics
Editors, authors and publisher adopt the guidelines developed by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the fair data principles. The journal adheres to the COPE Core Practices and the principles of transparency as described in the Declaration on transparent editorial policies for academic journals.
Code of Conduct
Check TU Delft OPEN Publishing code of conduct and integrity policy.
Similarity Check
A similarity check is part of the TU Delft OPEN Publishing standard publication procedure. Authors submitting their article to the IJWG should expect their work to go through a similarity analysis at any stage of the workflow. The editor and publisher carefully analyse the reports. In case of suspected plagiarism, the authors will have two weeks to provide an explanation.
The journal also checks for AI-generated content. Articles will be rejected unless using AI-generated tools is part of the work.
Use of AI
The use of AI technologies in writing/summarising is gaining popularity and is expanding. When used responsibly and appropriately in research, it can facilitate innovation. However, authors/editors remain fully responsible and accountable for the quality and content of their manuscripts. With this in mind and with reference to the COPE Position Statement of 13 February 2023, authors are required not to list AI tools as a co-author because these tools cannot take responsibility for the submitted work, and they need to be transparent in disclosing in the materials and methods of the manuscript how the AI tool was used and which tool was used (such as ChatGPT and other generative (language-based) AI tools for generation of images, etc.) in the writing of their manuscripts. If applicable, disclosure needs to take place at the bottom of the References section, in the Acknowledgements section, and separately in the cover letter submitted before the review process. This policy is subject to review based on new developments to include the COPE Position Statement.
Complaints and Appeals
Complaints
Complaints such as misconduct, authorship dispute or suspected conflict of interest should be brought to the attention of the publisher (publishing-lib@tudelft.nl) or the editorial board.
Author appeal
If an author wishes to appeal an editorial decision, the author may contact the Editors-in-Chief of the journal. Their appeal decisions are final. This means that discussing or negotiating the final decision will be without effect and can be ignored.
Conflict of Interest
All COIs will be handled as follows by the journal in first instance then the publisher:
- Disclosure: Anyone (editors, reviewers, authors and any other relevant parties) involved in the publishing process should disclose any potential conflicts of interest they may have
- Evaluation: After disclosing the potential COI, it needs to be examined to determine how important it is and its possible impact on the publication process.
- Management: An identified COI requires appropriate steps. Those steps may include stepping back from certain duties or decisions, removal from the publication process, or take other actions to reduce the conflict.
- Transparency: Any identified conflicts of interest should be transparently disclosed to relevant parties, including readers, authors, and reviewers.
- COI can be mentioned after the section Acknowledgment of the publication
Publication Notices and Changes
Any changes made to the published content will be accompanied by a post-publication notice which will be permanently linked to the original content.
Publication notices include errors introduced by the journal (erratum), an author error (corrigendum), adding a (small) document to a published work to provide additional information (addendum), and retraction.
The Editors-in-Chief and the publisher handle publication notices through the following steps:
- Reviewing the proposed changes to the published content to determine if they are necessary and appropriate.
- Preparing a post-publication notice that accurately reflects the changes made to the content.
- Linking the post-publication notice to the original content in a clear and prominent manner.
- Distributing the updated content and the post-publication notice to relevant parties, including subscribers, indexers, and other databases.
- Monitoring the impact of the changes on the academic record and making any necessary further updates or corrections.
Authorship
All co-authors must agree to submit the work to the journal. For authors dispute see the “Complaints and Appeals” section.
How to add extra authors before publication:
- All co-authors must agree to add new (co)authors to the publication
- Agreement must be collected and sent to the editor with an explanation
Guest Editors / Special Issues
IJWG requires an agreement between the Guest Editor(s) and the Editors-in-Chief where the Guest Editor(s)’s role is clearly defined. Guest Editors are subject to the same rules as editors of the journal and adhere to TU Delft OPEN Publishing policies.
Metadata
IJWG grants you the right to publish the metadata of the series, its issues and articles under the terms of the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0).
Indexing
IJWG with ISSN 2211-4505 is indexed by "Directory of Open Access scholarly Resources" (ROAD), the "European Reference Index for the humanities and the Social Sciences" (ERIHPLUS), Sherpa Romeo, The Keepers, Google Scholar and WorldCat.
Archiving
This journal utilizes the LOCKSS system to create a distributed archiving system among participating libraries and permits those libraries to create permanent archives of the journal for purposes of preservation and restoration. More...
Authors are allowed to deposit a Submitted version, an Accepted version (Author Accepted Manuscript) and a Published version (Version of record) of their work in an institutional or any other repository of their choice.
TU Delft OPEN Publishing is committed to the permanent availability and preservation of scholarly research. We work in partnership with organizations as well as maintaining our own digital archive.
Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in our published content are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the views opinions of TU Delft OPEN Publishing.
The responsibility of the content provided is exclusively of the author(s) concerned. TU Delft OPEN Publishing, IJWG, the editors and reviewers are not responsible for errors in the contents or any consequences arising from the use of information contained in it.
The opinions expressed in the publications of IJWG do not necessarily represent the views of TU Delft OPEN Publishing and the editors.
We follow and open access publishing principle, in which author(s) are the sole owners of the copyright of the content published, for any omissions, copyright violation author(s) of the concerned article are only responsible. Our responsibility is limited only to removal of the concerned article from the journal once the query is raised.
ISSN
2211-4505 online
Publisher
Images
Header image made by Sumit Vij
Cover image made by Afra Knaap
