Traversing the waterways

Abstract

Starting a new journal is a journey-or rather a community mobilization, as it requires a whole lot of individuals committed to establishing and growing a unified vision. Everyone in the community-researchers, editors, authors, reviewers, readers, practitioners, and publishers, along with academic, government, industry and non-profit organizations from all corners of the world-has a unique and essential role to play. Along the way all members have an opportunity to learn a great deal, about the publishing business, one another, and the growing body of knowledge about the freshwater sectors writ large.PLOS Water began publishing peer-reviewed freshwater research one year ago. Our first set of articles, released February 15, 2022, covered a range of topics including water and international trade, household sanitation services, water supply infrastructure, stormwater control, wastewater monitoring, and riverine pollution. These papers were accompanied by an inaugural editorial in which we laid out our vision and hopes for the journal, and how we might get there. We shared our aspiration for PLOS Water to be not just another venue for reporting science, but an active voice that influences and drives the future of the freshwater sectors. Now at the one-year mark, we celebrate the progress that the PLOS Water community has made, and also take the opportunity to reflect on areas where we may have fallen short of our aspirations. We also offer a way through for the next phase, one that will consolidate our growth, advance equitable and inclusive community engagement, and continue driving the field towards a more open way of communicating freshwater sciences. This commitment to open science remains a core value of PLOS Water (and all PLOS journals); it is an important point of differentiation during this era of proliferation in water sector publishing. Acknowledging the very real exigencies of academic publishing, we concur with Schymanski and Schymanski [1] that freshwater scholarship explores something central to humankind and the life support systems on which we depend. As such, profit must be secondary to the propagation and distribution of the knowledges that will be our guide for future use and management of this common good. In fact, if we are to do as Scho ¨lvinck et al. [2] recommend ". . .to employ public involvement as an extra stimulus for the practical application of knowledge", the public must have access to those knowledges.How have we been doing with regard to our vision of building bridges across the fragmented waterscapes of research? In our first year we have published around 60 articles spanning most of PLOS Water's scope, with 12 out of 14 sections represented to date. This is certainly gratifying, but publishing across subfields does not in itself foster collaboration among them. As we head into our second year, we will continue working to identify meaningful indicators of such 'bridge building,' along with testing strategies to advance this goal. Among these, we are particularly excited about develop...