Open Access Policy

1.  Open Access Statement

Industrial Water Treatment was founded in 1981 and flipped to an open-access journal under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license in 2022. All articles published by the journal since 2022 are open-access, available to all readers free of charge immediately and permanently upon publication. Readers may copy, distribute, and use these articles in accordance with the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

Articles published by the journal before its transition to open access (i.e., articles published in 2021 and earlier) are not open-access, and their copyrights are held by the sponsor of the journal, CNOOC Tianjin Chemical Research and Design Institute Co., Ltd. Articles from certain years are available for free HTML full-text reading or PDF full-text download on the journal's official website. Due to technical reasons, the full texts of articles from some years are not yet available on our official website. If readers require access to these articles, they may visit databases such as China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) and Wanfang Data (non-open access platforms) to obtain the full text of the relevant articles.

2.  Licensing Policy

For open-access articles published by the journal (i.e., those published since 2022), permissible third-party reuse is defined by the following license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This license allows users to copy and distribute the articles in any medium or format provided that the license terms below are followed:

Users must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes to the article were made. Users may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the journal endorses the use. Users may not use the articles for commercial purposes. If users re-mix, transform, or build upon the article, they may not distribute the modified article. The full details of the license are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 

3.  Copyright Policy

Authors are required to sign the Copyright Transfer Agreement to transfer the copyright of their article to the sponsor of the journal, CNOOC Tianjin Chemical Research and Design Institute Co., Ltd. Upon publication of the article, the copyright will belong to CNOOC Tianjin Chemical Research and Design Institute Co., Ltd., with related rights exercised on its behalf by the Editorial Office of Industrial Water Treatment.

Authors have the right to use their published article under the following circumstances:

(1) Reproducing, disseminating, and using the article freely in accordance with the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License, such as non-commercial academic seminars, communication, academic reports, and lectures.

(2) Using the article in other activities permitted and authorized by the journal.

If the article is not published by the journal at the end, the Copyright Transfer Agreement shall be invalid automatically. The template of the Agreement can be found in Downloads.