About the Journal

Focus and Scope

EQA is an international, multidisciplinary and peer-reviewed journal that encourages high-quality submissions of original research or brief reviews and analyses dealing with the aspects concerning soil, water and air quality and the sustainable use of these environmental resources. Main research areas include: natural and anthropogenic processes affecting the soil, water and air biota; contamination of soil, water and air caused by waste management and disposal practices; ecological effects of pollutants in air, water and soil environments; environmental quality management techniques, methods, approaches and experiences to improve and remediate the environment and the dissemination of such knowledge.

Peer Review Process

EQA is a peer-reviewed open access journal. All publications in EQA undergo a single blind peer review process.

Submitted manuscripts will be assigned to one of the EQA editors. The editor and editorial board member will promptly assess the manuscript and will decide if it is likely to meet the requirement of providing a major advance in a particular field and describing a sufficient body of work to support that claim; if so, it will be sent out for peer review. The editor then make a decision based on the reviewers' comments. There are several types of decision possible:

Accept the manuscript as submitted
Accept it with minor revision
Invite the authors to submit a major revision of the manuscript before a final decision is reached
Reject, typically because it does not fit the criteria outlined above of originality, importance to the field, cross-discipline interest, or sound methodology

When differences of opinion occur between reviewers, the editor weigh all comments and arrive at a balanced decision based on all comments. To assist in this process, the reviewer should provide the editor with as much information as possible. A review that clearly outlines reasons both for and against publication is therefore of as much, or even more, value as one that makes a direct recommendation.

If reviewers appear to disagree fundamentally, the editor may choose to share all the reviews with each of the reviewers and by this means elicit additional comment that may help the editor to make a decision. The editor then assess the recommendations and comments of the reviewers alongside comments by the authors and material that may not have been made available to those reviewers. The name of the reviewers are hidden from the authors.

When a paper has been revised in response to comments by reviewers or when authors feel their argument has been misconstrued in review, we ask reviewers to offer additional comments on the revised or contested manuscript. We request that reviewers make themselves available to provide such follow-up advice. We are nevertheless aware that reviewers do not wish to be involved in extended discussions over papers, and we keep such consultations to a minimum while still allowing authors a fair hearing.

Publication Frequency

The journal is published twice a year.

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

It releases its articles under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

This license allows anyone to download, reuse, re-print, modify, distribute and/or copy the contributions without commercial purposes. The works must be properly attributed to its author(s). It is not necessary to ask further permissions both to author(s) or journal board, although you are kindly requested to inform the journal for every reuse of the papers.

Authors who publish on this journal maintain the copyrights.

Authors are welcome to post the final draft post-refereeing (postprint) on a personal website, a collaborative wiki, departmental website, social media websites, institutional repository or non-commercial subject-based repositories.

Publication Fees

The journal has neither article processing charges nor submission processing fees.

Ethical conduct in scientific publishing

Author(s) should understand and scrupulously uphold high standards for ethical behavior in the conduct of research, particularly in relation to the verification and truthful reporting of data, the granting of proper credit, and referencing of the work of others in publication. Plagiarism of another's work is a form of theft and constitutes serious misconduct. In publication it is essential that each co-author contributes significantly to the research reported and openly accepts joint responsibility for the work. If these conditions cannot be met, the person should not be included as an author. Simultaneous submissions of an article describing the same research to more than one publication constitutes misconduct because it wastes editorial and referees' time for the author's own purposes. Similarly, publishing the same results in more than one primary research journal is a form of misconduct and is not acceptable. Exceptions are made by some journals for previous publication in conference proceedings. At submission an author is bound to disclose any prior appearance of the work so that the journal may make an informed decision about whether to accept it for peer review.

Indexing and Abstracting

Archiving Policy

The University of Bologna has an archival arrangement with the National Central Libraries of Florence and Rome within the national project Magazzini Digitali.
http://www.depositolegale.it/editori-aderenti/

Publisher

Department of Agricultural and Food Sciences – DISTAL
Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna

Viale Giuseppe Fanin, 44
40127 - Bologna (Italy)