IAHS is pleased to launch the online open-access continuation of the IAHS Red Book series. The new proceedings journal, Proceedings of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences, or PIAHS, is published by Copernicus Publications on behalf of IAHS. The Editor-in-Chief is Christophe Cudennec, the IAHS Secretary General.

This change means that future papers published in the IAHS proceedings journal will be free to view/download, and so visible to a worldwide audience. The metadata for each paper will be available to indexing organisations and citations will be recorded. Print copies of PIAHS volumes will be available to order. You can already view PIAHS as the proceedings of ICWRS2014, Evolving Water Resources Systems: Predicting and Managing Water–Society Interactions – is now available as PIAHS vol. 364.

From 2015, all future IAHS conference proceedings will be published by Copernicus Publications as volumes in PIAHS. The first volumes to be so published will be of papers selected for three IAHS symposia at IUGG2015: JS1, HS1 and HS2.

Papers will be published in PIAHS by invitation only after selection and review of abstracts/papers submitted for presentation at an IAHS event. Anyone wishing to submit a paper to PIAHS should arrange to present a paper at a forthcoming IAHS event (see the IAHS Calendar). Suggestions for topics for IAHS events should be made to officers of the IAHS Bureau, Commissions or Working Groups.

As with other open-access journals, it will be necessary for authors to pay for publication of their paper. Depending on the event the volume is associated with, this may be incorporated into the registration fee for the event, or direct payment to Copernicus Publications may be necessary. Copernicus’s online publication fees are low compared to other publishers; IAHS/event organizers may subsidize costs for authors from financially-disadvantaged countries.

For now, the backfile of earlier IAHS Red Books/proceedings volumes will remain at the IAHS website; abstracts of papers in all recent volumes are available, and PDFs of the full papers in volumes 1–318 are free to view/download. Uploading of full papers of more recent volumes will continue and eventually all will be freely available online.

“Publishing our Red Books open access will give our members and conference participants more exposure and access to the international hydrological community. I am very pleased with the agreement that we signed with Copernicus, which marks the beginning of a new open access publication policy of IAHS. Through our cooperation with Copernicus, not only will the open access publications of our Red Books be more visible and accessible, but the organization of our conferences will also become more uniform, more efficient and professional. We look forward to a very fruitful and lasting cooperation with Copernicus” comments Hubert Savenije, President of IAHS.

“This new collaboration with IAHS provides us with the opportunity to serve this lively scientific community with our wide array of services in the best way possible,” says Martin Rasmussen, Managing Director of Copernicus.org. “We are proud that we can assist IAHS in the work they do for their scientists.”