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 (diamond-open-access). 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. The first volume of JCHS was published in 2021.

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 Publishing, ensuring availability of archived material in perpetuity. Papers are published online individually as they are accepted and format is approved. JCHS is indexed in Google Scholar, Worldcat, ROAD, and the Norwegian register for scientific journals. TU Delft OPEN Publishing is working to enlist JCHS in the more indexing systems (Clarivate, DOAJ and Scopus).

Peer review policy and quality control

JCHS follows a double-blind peer review process. Herein the reviewers and authors identities are not visible to each other (double anonymized). The reviewers interact with/via the (section) editor. Anonymized reviewer reports and author/editor communication are published with the publication.  No (open) post-publication commenting is adopted. (For peer review terminologies, see link). The journal is committed to a transparent review process that adheres to the COPE policy. Editors and reviewers are encouraged to join COPE individually and agreed to declare any conflict of interest.

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 Section 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 may also be involved in publications in the journal, but a rigorous review workflow is implemented to ensure the integrity and quality of the review process. If an Editor is listed as (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. 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". After acceptance of a copyedited manuscript, it is published. The anonymous reviews will be published together with the published paper.

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 Section Editor before the manuscript can be published. Authors can appeal to decisions, see under Publication Ethics.

Guest editors can be appointed by the Editorial Board. They have the same role as (Section) Editors for the papers that are submitted to a Special Issues or Thematic Series that they lead. They are aided by a more experienced Editor from the board that will ensure the quality and uniformity of the publishing process.

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. All papers are assigned a unique incremental number depending on the order of publication. 

Special Issues and Thematic Series

JCHS adopts Special Issues and Thematic Series. Special Issues are added as extra separate issues, while Thematic Series are identified as such on the paper, but follow the normal continuous publication routine mentioned above. See under About/Submissions for more information.

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.

Publication ethics

Editors, authors and publisher adhere to the TU Delft Code of Conduct, its Integrity Policy, the publication procedure of TU Delft OPEN Publishing, the Core Practices of COPE, and and the principles of transparency as described here. 

Complaints. Complaints such as misconduct, authorship dispute or suspected conflict of interest can be addressed to the publisher (publishing-lib@tudelft.nl) or the editorial board.

Author appeal. Appeals to an editorial decision can be brought by a corresponding author to the editorial board, by contacting the (vice-) Editor-in-Chief of the journal. The editorial board will decide on the appeal by majority vote (without the editor that made the decision). Their appeal decisions are final.

Conflict of interest (COI). 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 will be examined by the editorial board 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.

Preferably the Section Editor that handled the paper handles publication notices through the following steps (if that editor is not available, another editor or the publisher can also be appointed):

  • 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. The corresponding author shall primarily discuss the involvement of the fellow authors. JCHS communicates with all authors to check their agreement of being involved. The contributions of the various contributing authors are given in a final section of the paper following the CRediT system. See the site of TU Delft OPEN Publishing for details.

Code of conduct. JCHS and TU Delft OPEN Publishing adhere to the TU Delft code of conduct and integrity policy.

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 (iThenticate) is performed additionally. In case of (alleged or proven) copyright breaches or scientific misconduct (e.g. fabricating data), papers can (respectively temporarily or permanently) be removed from the JCHS website after a majority decision by the editorial board. In case of suspected plagiarism, the authors will have two weeks to provide an explanation.

JCHS grants authors 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).

Data policy

We encourage the open sharing of the data on which the published findings are based, using the FAIR data principles. Data can be added with the paper on the JCHS website, or a link to an open repository can be given. Complete open sharing of data is not yet obligatory. The paper should describe the work in such detail that the results are reproducible.

Submission charges and Article Processing Charges

Publishing a paper in diamond-open-access journal 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). TU Delft OPEN Publishing is working on enlisting JCHS in more indexing systems (Clarivate, DOAJ and Scopus), such that all published paper will (retroactively) be subject to impact evaluation.

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. These institutions are mentioned on the Editorial Team page. 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 also received support from the Open Access Innovation Fund of the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam. We gratefully acknowledge these contributions.

ISSN
2667-047X  online

Archiving

This journal utilises the LOCKSS system to create a distributed archiving system among participating libraries. It permits those libraries to create permanent archives of the journal for purposes of preservation and restoration. More...

Authors can 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 they choose.

TU Delft OPEN Publishing is committed to the permanent availability and preservation of scholarly research. We work in partnership with organisations and maintain our digital archive.