IWA Publishing Launches Pilot to Flip its Entire Journal Portfolio to Open Access | IWA Publishing

"IWA Publishing, the wholly owned publishing subsidiary of the International Water Association based in London, UK, has announced a pilot to transform its complete journal portfolio of 10 subscription titles including the flagship journal Water Science & Technology to Open Access (OA) from 2021 onwards. In partnership with Knowledge Unlatched, IWA Publishing will be asking those libraries and institutions currently subscribing to any of the journals to renew for 2021 on a Subscribe-to-Open (S2O) basis, thus contributing to making these journals completely free to readers and authors all over the world.

With this flip IWA Publishing is aiming for one of the largest flips of a publishing portfolio to date. "We are confident that flipping our portfolio of journals to Open Access will shift the way in which our content is used and will have a beneficial impact on research which helps provide people in all nations with clean drinking water and good sanitation,” says IWA Publishing’s Managing Director Rod Cookson. "We now request the support of subscribing libraries by backing the model, which should also represent a sustainable solution to Open Access across publications and publishers of all sizes. With support from libraries and institutions across the world, we hope that the S2O model will be adopted more widely as an alternative to the ‘Publish and Read’ Big Deals which are starting to dominate the Open Access landscape to the detriment of smaller-scale journals.”..."