One year of JCHS, ready for year two.

Engineers and scientists need to make structures for a society of ever increasing complexity, and with sea level rise more and more of these structures could well be in water. Hence we need high level knowledge on the interaction of these man-made interventions with water. To this end, we started JCHS one year ago to help disseminate knowledge on hydraulic and coastal structures in an open, community-based, APC-less and FAIR way.

And it is going well. We published a double-digit amount of papers, on a variety of topics ranging from the classic topic of rock stability, to overtopping, to field measurements, tsunamis, renewable energy, navigation, and nature-based structures. This shows the large range of multidisciplinary topics that is of importance for hydraulic and coastal structures.

I also noticed the need of institutes, companies and governments to publish and read high-level academic works. While much interesting knowledge on coastal and hydraulic structures is gathered by the engineers build and design them, they often lack the rigorous peer-review process to publish the core of their findings at an academic level (e.g. embedded well in literature, and focussed on the fundamental findings). Additionally, article processing charges (APC) are less accepted in a private environment, and private organizations have less access to existing academic publications. On the other hand, academic scholars can learn from practical studies what the real knowledge gaps are in practise. I feel that in this sense JCHS could play a bridging role between academia and the organizations that need to apply the knowledge developed there.

We would like to thank all the authors, reviewers and associate editors for all their high quality contributions. Also the support of the German Federal Waterways Engineering and Research Institute (BAW), and the Dutch department of Waterways and Public Works (Rijkswaterstaat) is heartily acknowledged.

And this is only the beginning. At the moment we have 9 papers in the review process, which promises much for 2022. Now we have a track record, our publisher TU Delft OPEN will start to get us in the first indexing systems this year, such that we will become even more attractive for academic authors.

We wish you all the best for 2022, and hope to receive many more high-level contributions from you in year two (tip for a new-year’s resolution).

On behalf of the editorial team of JCHS,
Bas Hofland

Alessandro Antonini, Hans Bihs, Jeremy Bricker, Daniel Bung, Brian Crookston, Sebastien Erpicum, Miguel Esteban, Nils Goseberg, Bas Hofland, Rebekka Kopmann, Eva Loukogeorgaki, Thao Nguyen, Anton Schleiss, Carsten Thorenz