About the Journal

Mission, scope, and approach

The Journal of Coastal and Hydraulic Structures (JCHS) is a completely free and open access community-based journal. All papers are rigorously peer-reviewed in a double-blind fashion. Its mission is to publish high level engineering science results focused on the field of coastal and hydraulic structures. 

JCHS publishes fundamental research studies, case studies of projects and review articles. The scope of content ranges from the fluid mechanics, fluid-structure interaction and hydraulics of loads, to risk analysis of hazards and consequences, inspections and maintenance, damage and failure countermeasures, laboratory and numerical methods, nature based solutions, and related topics pertaining to structures at ports, coasts, waterways and lakes. Interdisciplinary topics treating hydraulics combined with structural design and analysis, geotechnical issues, and local sediment transport (scour) are also welcomed. Case studies and post-disaster field surveys whose findings add value to the understanding and optimization of hydraulic and coastal structures are equally considered. Manuscript submissions are welcome from academia, industry, government, and all others whose work related to the scope.

JCHS is entirely open access and free for both authors and readers. JCHS is published by TU Delft OPEN, ensuring availability of archived material in perpetuity. Papers are published online individually as they are accepted and format is approved. TU Delft Open will ensure that JCHS will be listed asap in the various indexing systems (like Google Scholar, DOAJ and Scopus), such that all published paper can (retroactively) be subject to impact evaluation.

 

Peer review policy and quality control

The (acting) editor-in-chief divides the submitted manuscripts over the editors and can also handle a manuscript him-/herself. The assigned editor can decline a manuscript before sending it out for review when it is out-of-scope, or of apparent insufficient qualify (e.g. clear lack of sufficient English language level). The assigned editor makes the final decision on acceptance of a manuscript. In editorial meetings selected review results and decisions are discussed amongst the editorial board in order to obtain and sustain a common quality baseline.

Because the community-based JCHS has a large editorial board, the editors themselves will also be involved in publications in the journal. If an editor is (co)author, the editor will not be involved in the review process at all, and cannot obtain the reviewers' identity. If the editor-in-chief is (co)author, then also the selection of the section-editor handling the paper will be done by the vice-editor-in-chief.

All papers have to be submitted from the start in the final formatting in order to facilitate the review process and to enable the reviewers to comment on formatting. All papers are subjected to a double-blind review. The standard period for reviewers for a single review round is 3 to 4 weeks in order to have a balance between high quality thorough reviews and sufficiently fast publication. Reviews are performed by reviewers that are experienced in the field and the reviews will be based on a well-defined list of quality aspects (see our submission section). At minimum two reviews are needed to accept a paper. The decision on a (re)submitted version of a paper can be any of: "accept", "resubmit with minor revisions" (no review required), "major revisions" (new review round required), or "reject". Authors can appeal to decisions, which will be decided on by the editorial board by majority vote. After the content of a paper is approved by the editor (based on the review), the final formatting (typesetting) will have to be made by the author(s), and to be approved by the assigned editor before the manuscript can be published. After acceptance of a copyedited manuscript, it is published. The anonymous reviews will be published together with the published paper.

 

Frequency of publication

The journal uses continuous publication. Papers are published immediately after acceptance in the one journal volume / issue per year and archived in this manner. Additionally, special issues may be added as separate issues. All papers are assigned a unique incremental number depending on the order of publication.

 

Open Access & Licensing terms

The JCHS is a fully open access journal. All papers are hosted under a CC BY 4.0 licence, and the author retains the copyright on the material. The contributions of the various contributing authors are given in a final section of the paper following the CRediT system.

 

Publication ethics

Editors, authors and publisher adopt the guidelines developed by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

 

Plagiarism policy

All papers need to present substantial relevant and identifiably new findings. All data and ideas that are presented as new need to be that. Parts of text and images can be reproduced from the authors own previous works, as long as copyright is still owned by the authors and the original sources are referred to adequately and a substantial new and original part is present in the manuscript. If reproducing items by others the authors must have obtained written permission for that use.

All papers are checked for plagiarism by the assigned editor and reviewers, and a software-based plagiarism check can be performed additionally. In case of (alleged or proven) copyright breaches or scientific misconduct (e.g. fabricating data), papers can be (temporarily or permanently) removed from the JCHS website by the editors.

 

Submission charges and Article Processing Charges

Publishing a paper in JCHS is completely free, so neither Submission Charges nor Article Processing Charge are required from the authors.

 

Indexing

JCHS is indexed in Google Scholar, Worldcat, ROAD (directory of open access scholarly resources), and the Norwegian register for scientific journals (level 1).

 

Sponsoring

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. Extra contributions are given by TU Delft (the journal management platform and publishing advice), the German Federal Waterways Engineering and Research Institute BAW (formatting verification and secretarial support), and Rijkswaterstaat, the Dutch department of Waterways and Public Works (contribution to formatting support). We gratefully acknowledge these contributions.

 

ISSN
2667-047X  online