EQA

About EQA

EQA — International Journal of Environmental Quality: A Complete Profile

EQA, in full the International Journal of Environmental Quality, is an international, multidisciplinary, peer-reviewed open access journal devoted to the quality of soil, water and air and to the sustainable use of those environmental resources. It is published in Italy by the Alma Mater Studiorum — University of Bologna, through its AlmaDL Journals publishing service, and it is owned by the university's Department of Agricultural and Food Sciences (DISTAL). Its print ISSN is 2039-9898 and its electronic ISSN is 2281-4485, as recorded by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and by OpenAlex. The journal's own site describes a readership and authorship drawn from environmental sciences, agricultural sciences and biological sciences, and its history reaches back to a series of annual scientific conferences held at Imola, in Italy, from 2006 onwards.

This profile brings together everything a prospective author, a librarian or an evaluator needs in one place: the journal's identity and history, its publisher and ownership, its subject scope in detail, its editorial leadership and peer review model, the bibliometric picture that can be verified from named databases, its indexing record, its open access and fee position, practical guidance on how to submit, a comparison with neighbouring journals, and answers to the questions readers most often ask about EQA. Every figure quoted here is attributed to the source from which it was taken, and any point that could not be verified from a source actually consulted is stated as such rather than filled in by guesswork.

Quick Facts

• Full title: EQA — International Journal of Environmental Quality
• Abbreviated title: EQA
• Print ISSN: 2039-9898
• Electronic ISSN: 2281-4485
• Publisher: Alma Mater Studiorum — Università di Bologna (AlmaDL Journals), Italy
• Owning body: Department of Agricultural and Food Sciences — DISTAL, University of Bologna
• Country: Italy
• Language of publication: English (DOAJ record)
• Frequency: Six times a year, with continuous updating of each open issue (journal's own site)
• Peer review: Single anonymous (single blind) review, with two external referees for papers that pass the initial assessment (journal's own site; DOAJ)
• Open access: Immediate open access under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence; authors retain copyright (journal's own site; DOAJ)
• Article processing charge: None — the journal states that it has neither article processing charges nor submission processing fees
• First open access year: 2009 (DOAJ)
• Supporting societies named by the journal: European Society for Soil Conservation (ESSC), Italian Society of Soil Science (SISS) and Italian Society of Pedology (SIPE)

History and Identity

The journal's own history, as told on its official site, begins not with a journal at all but with a conference. The acronym EQA derives from "Environmental Quality — Qualité de l'Environnement — Qualità ambientale", the trilingual title of the proceedings of scientific conferences held annually at Imola since 2006. In those proceedings, each paper carried its title, abstract and keywords in three languages — English, French and Italian — while the body of a manuscript could be written in one of the three. That multilingual, soil-and-environment conference culture is the soil, in every sense, from which the journal grew.

In 2009 the annual proceedings were published together with the first two volumes of the International Journal of Environmental Quality, in which sixteen articles appeared. The DOAJ record independently gives 2009 as the year from which the journal's open access content runs, which matches the journal's own account. From 2010 to 2013 the journal published three volumes a year; from 2014 to 2019 it published four volumes a year; in 2020 it published five volumes; and across 2021 and 2022 it published thirty articles in six volumes. The journal itself characterises this as a slow but continuous progression in the number of articles and volumes published. In 2019, for the celebration of the tenth anniversary of EQA, the editorial format of the published papers changed, improving the readability of texts, figures and tables. The current stated frequency is six issues a year, with each issue remaining open in a continuous update mode until the following volume appears.

Two features of this history matter for authors deciding where to send work. First, EQA is a university journal in the direct institutional sense: it is not a commercial title that happens to have academic editors, but a Bologna university publication, published through the university's AlmaDL service and owned by a named university department. Second, its roots in the Italian and European soil science community — through the European Society for Soil Conservation, the Italian Society of Soil Science and the Italian Society of Pedology, all named by the journal as supporters — explain both its strong soil science centre of gravity and its international referee and author base in environmental quality research.

Scope and Subject Coverage

EQA encourages, in its own words, high-quality submissions of original research and of brief reviews and analyses dealing with the aspects concerning soil, water and air quality and the sustainable use of these environmental resources. Its main research areas, as listed by the journal, are:

• 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.

The DOAJ record classifies the journal under the Library of Congress heading "Environmental pollution" and gives its keywords as soil, soil contamination and environmental quality. OpenAlex, resolving the journal through its ISSN record, paints the same picture from the citation side: its largest topic clusters for EQA are heavy metals in the environment, water quality and pollution assessment, soil carbon and nitrogen dynamics, environmental and analytical chemistry studies, and environmental toxicology and ecotoxicology (OpenAlex, at the time of checking). A manuscript is therefore most likely to fit EQA when it measures, explains or helps to remedy the quality of an environmental compartment — a soil, a water body, an airshed — rather than when it treats the environment only as a backdrop. Purely theoretical work with no environmental quality application, and clinical or biomedical work with no soil, water or air component, sit outside the stated scope.

The journal states that it particularly welcomes work addressed to scientific researchers in environmental sciences, agricultural and biological sciences. In practice that means agronomists studying soil fertility and contamination, environmental chemists measuring pollutants, ecologists assessing effects on biota, and remediation specialists reporting methods that worked — or that failed in instructive ways — are the journal's core community. Brief reviews and analyses are explicitly welcome alongside original research, which makes EQA a plausible home for a focused synthesis on, for example, a contaminant class, a remediation technique or a monitoring method, provided the synthesis is genuinely analytical rather than a bare listing of prior papers.

Publisher, Ownership and Support

The publisher of record is the Alma Mater Studiorum — Università di Bologna, whose address the journal gives as Via Zamboni 33, 40126 Bologna, Italy, publishing through its AlmaDL Journals service, part of the university's Alma Diamond open scholarly communication programme. Ownership rests with the Department of Agricultural and Food Sciences — DISTAL, at Viale Giuseppe Fanin 44, 40127 Bologna. The DOAJ record names the publisher as the University of Bologna and the institution as the University of Bologna's Dipartimento di Scienze Agrarie, and it gives Italy as the country of publication — all consistent with the journal's own pages and with the publisher taxonomy held on the JournalsWorld record for this post, which names the Department of Agricultural and Food Sciences, University of Bologna.

Editorial support is acknowledged by the journal to the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Imola and to GeoLab Onlus, and scientific support to the Società Italiana di Pedologia and the Società Italiana della Scienza del Suolo, alongside the European Society for Soil Conservation named in the journal's scope statement. This support structure is worth understanding for what it implies about costs: EQA belongs to the diamond open access family in practice, in that neither readers nor authors pay, and the costs of publication are carried institutionally — a point the journal confirms directly in its fee statement, discussed below.

Editorial Leadership and Governance

The journal's editorial team page, consulted for this profile, lists seven Editors-in-Chief: Giuseppe Corti (CREA Agriculture and Environment), Carmelo Dazzi (University of Palermo), Gloria Falsone (Department of Agricultural and Food Sciences, University of Bologna), Radim Vacha (Research Institute for Soil and Water Conservation, Prague, where he is also named as director of the institute), Gilmo Vianello (Accademia Nazionale di Agricoltura), Livia Vittori Antisari (Department of Agricultural and Food Sciences, University of Bologna) and David C. Weindorf (Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Central Michigan University, United States). The Publishing Manager is Federica Rossi (Department of Cultural Heritage, University of Bologna), and the Emeritus Editor is Giacomo Buganè of GEOLAB APS, also named as its president. A team of Associate Editors drawn from universities and research institutes in Italy, Romania, Greece, India, Sweden, Spain, Ukraine and Kazakhstan supports the editors-in-chief, according to the same page.

That breadth is not decorative. A journal whose scope spans soil processes, water pollution, air quality and remediation needs handling editors who can judge work in each of those areas and who can find competent referees for it, and the listed team spans soil science, pedology, agricultural and food sciences, earth sciences and environmental management across several countries. Authors should nevertheless check the editorial team page again at the moment of submission, because boards change and the page consulted for this profile is a snapshot in time.

On ethics, the journal states that it adopts the AlmaDL Journals Code of Ethics, which is inspired by the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), in particular the COPE Core Practices and the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing. All parties involved in the editorial process — editorial staff, authors and reviewers — are expected to know and apply those principles. On data, the journal encourages authors, where relevant, to follow Open Science and FAIR principles by publishing the research data associated with their articles in trusted data repositories, and it points University of Bologna authors to AMSActa, the university's institutional research data repository.

Peer Review and Editorial Process

EQA describes itself as a peer-reviewed open access journal, and all publications in it undergo a single blind peer review process — the model the DOAJ record labels "single anonymous peer review". Submitted manuscripts are assigned to one of the EQA editors. As part of the initial quality assessment, each article undergoes plagiarism detection through iThenticate. The editor and an editorial board member then promptly assess the manuscript and decide whether it is likely to meet the requirement of providing a major advance in a particular field and of describing a sufficient body of work to support that claim. After this formal assessment, if the outcome is positive, the submission is sent to two external referees, who are picked on the basis of their expertise and knowledge of the paper's topics. The editor then makes a decision based on the reviewers' comments.

The possible decisions, as the journal lists them, are: accept the manuscript as submitted; accept it with minor revision; invite the authors to submit a major revision before a final decision is reached; or reject, typically because the work does not meet the criteria of originality, importance to the field, cross-discipline interest or sound methodology. Reviewer names are hidden from authors. Where reviewers differ, the editor weighs all comments and arrives at a balanced decision, and the journal asks reviewers to outline reasons both for and against publication, since a review of that kind can be of as much or more value than one that makes a direct recommendation. Reviewers may be asked for additional comments on a revised or contested manuscript, although the journal says it keeps such consultations to a minimum while still allowing authors a fair hearing.

The DOAJ record gives the journal's publication time as twelve weeks. Authors should treat that as the directory's recorded figure for the typical path rather than as a promise for any individual paper: a manuscript needing major revision, or one in a topic where referees are scarce, will take longer, and the two-referee model means the timetable is set by the slower of two busy experts. The practical lessons from the process description are threefold. First, the initial assessment is a real gate, not a formality — a paper that does not present a clear advance will not reach referees. Second, originality screening through iThenticate happens before review, so overlapping text from an author's own earlier papers needs the same care as in any other journal. Third, because decisions turn on referee comments weighed by an editor, a revision letter that answers every referee point in order, and shows exactly where the manuscript changed, is the single most useful document an author can send back.

Metrics — What Can Be Verified, and From Where

Journal metrics are only useful when the source and the date are attached to them, because each database counts a different document set over a different window. For EQA, the verifiable picture at the time of checking is as follows. OpenAlex, resolving the journal through its ISSN endpoint to its source record for EQA — International Journal of Environmental Quality, records 445 works, 1,100 citations to those works, an h-index of 13, an i10-index of 25 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.45 (OpenAlex, at the time of checking; OpenAlex source records merge and split over time, so these figures should be re-checked before being quoted elsewhere). The earlier JournalsWorld template record for this post gave an h-index of 9, which illustrates the general point: h-index values differ between databases because their coverage differs, and neither figure is "wrong" — they are answers from different counting systems.

The journal's own indexing page states that EQA is indexed in Scopus and in the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) of Web of Science, among many other services listed in the next section. A Journal Impact Factor for EQA could not be verified from the journal's own site or from DOAJ during the preparation of this profile, and is therefore not stated here; readers who need the current impact factor or CiteScore for a promotion or reporting file should take it directly from Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports or from Scopus at the time they need it, since those values are recalculated annually. Likewise, no acceptance rate for the journal could be verified from an official source, and none is claimed. What can fairly be said from the verified record is that EQA is a small-to-mid-sized specialist journal — a few hundred works in OpenAlex's count — with a citation footprint concentrated in soil and water pollution research, and a long, continuous publication history since 2009 that evaluators can inspect issue by issue on the journal's site.

Indexing and Abstracting

The journal's own indexing and abstracting page lists the following services: ACNP — the Italian Catalogue of Serials; BASE — the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine; DOAJ — the Directory of Open Access Journals; EZB — the Electronic Journals Library of the University of Regensburg; Google Scholar; Jisc Library Hub Discover; JournalTOCs; Mir@bel; Open Policy Finder; ROAD — the Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources maintained through the ISSN Portal; Scopus; Ulrichsweb; Web of Science — Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI); WorldCat; and ZDB — the German serials catalogue (Zeitschriftendatenbank). The DOAJ listing itself was verified directly from the DOAJ search API for this profile: the record for ISSN 2039-9898 is present, gives the alternative title International Journal of Environmental Quality, and records a last full review date in the record's administrative data. OpenAlex's source record likewise marks the journal as in DOAJ and as an OJS-based publication.

For authors, the practical weight of this list is concentrated in three entries. Scopus indexing means articles are visible in the database most institutions use for literature searching and evaluation outside the Web of Science system. ESCI indexing means the journal sits inside the Web of Science Core Collection's emerging tier, with articles discoverable in Web of Science searches. DOAJ listing means the journal has passed the directory's checks on peer review, licensing and transparency for open access titles — a check that matters because DOAJ removes titles that stop meeting its criteria. Preservation is covered, according to DOAJ, through the PKP Preservation Network (PKP PN), and the journal states that, as part of AlmaDL Journals, it adopts the publishing service's strategy for long-term preservation of published content.

Open Access, Licensing and Fees

EQA provides immediate open access to its content, on the principle — stated in its open access policy — that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. Articles are released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY), and the DOAJ record confirms both the CC BY licence and that authors retain copyright. Authors who publish in the journal maintain their copyrights, and the journal welcomes authors posting the final post-refereeing draft on a personal website, a collaborative wiki, a departmental website, social media, an institutional repository or a non-commercial subject repository.

On charges, the journal is unambiguous: "The journal has neither article processing charges nor submission processing fees." The DOAJ record agrees, recording that the journal has no article processing charge and no other charges. There is no waiver policy to describe, because there is no charge to waive — the DOAJ record states that the journal has no waiver programme, which in this context simply reflects the absence of fees. For authors without grant funding for publication charges, and for institutions counting the cost of open access mandates, EQA is therefore one of the shrinking set of journals where an accepted paper costs its authors nothing at any stage: not at submission, not at acceptance, and not for colour figures or page length, so far as any official statement consulted for this profile records. No other publication charges could be verified, and none are claimed here beyond the journal's own clear statement.

How to Submit

Submissions are made through the journal's own site at eqa.unibo.it, whose submissions pages carry the current author guidelines and copyright notice — the DOAJ record links the author instructions and the copyright notice to those pages, and authors should always work from the live versions there rather than from any summary, including this one. Before submitting, an author should take four practical steps that follow directly from the journal's stated process. First, test the manuscript honestly against the scope: does it report original research, or a brief review or analysis, about soil, water or air quality or the sustainable use of those resources? Second, make the advance explicit in the abstract and introduction, because the initial editorial assessment turns on whether the work provides a major advance supported by a sufficient body of work. Third, check the text for overlap with prior publications, because iThenticate screening is part of the initial assessment. Fourth, prepare the manuscript so that texts, figures and tables follow the journal's current presentation format, which was refreshed for the journal's tenth anniversary in 2019.

During review, expect a single anonymous process: the referees will know the authors' identities, while referee names are hidden from authors. Expect two external reports for papers that pass the initial gate, and expect one of the four decisions listed earlier. If a major revision is invited, treat the referee reports as a work order: revise thoroughly, document every change, and explain respectfully any point where the authors disagree, remembering that referees may be consulted again on the revised manuscript. The DOAJ-recorded publication time of twelve weeks gives a planning horizon for the overall path, but authors with a hard deadline — a thesis defence, a project report, a funding milestone — should build in slack, because revision rounds, not editorial handling, are what usually stretch a timetable. After acceptance, the article appears open access under CC BY with the authors retaining copyright, and the version of record is preserved through the journal's archiving arrangements described above.

Similar and Neighbouring Journals

Authors weighing EQA against alternatives usually have one of three needs: a wider environmental science audience, a more specialised soil audience, or a water-focused audience. Journals frequently considered alongside EQA include the following. Environmental Science and Pollution Research covers pollution research at much larger scale and across a broader range of compartments, for authors who want a big general pollution audience. Water, Air, & Soil Pollution is the long-established comparator whose very title maps onto EQA's three compartments, for authors choosing between an Italian university open access title and a traditional commercial title. Soil & Tillage Research and Geoderma serve the soil science core of EQA's community at high specialisation, for work whose contribution is mainly to soil science itself rather than to environmental quality assessment. Journal of Soils and Sediments fits work on soils and sediments in their environmental context, including remediation. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment fits monitoring-method and assessment papers that in EQA would form part of a quality study. None of these titles charges or reviews in the same way as EQA, and fee, licence and timetable positions differ from journal to journal; the honest comparison an author can make is on scope fit, audience, indexing and total cost, using each journal's own current pages — and on that comparison EQA's combination of zero charges, CC BY licensing and Scopus and ESCI indexing is genuinely distinctive for a journal of its size.

Is EQA Right for Your Paper?

EQA is likely to be right for your paper if your study measures or explains the quality of soil, water or air; if it reports contamination arising from waste management or disposal, ecological effects of pollutants, or a management or remediation technique with evidence of how it performed; if you need or prefer open access with no author charges; and if Scopus and Web of Science ESCI discoverability meet your institution's requirements. It is less likely to be right if your institution requires a journal in the Science Citation Index Expanded tier specifically, if your work has no environmental quality component, or if you need the very large readership of a general environmental science title. Those judgements, not any single metric, are what determine whether a paper thrives after publication — in citations, in readers, and in the community that can build on it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of EQA?
The print ISSN is 2039-9898 and the electronic ISSN is 2281-4485, as recorded by DOAJ and OpenAlex.

What does EQA stand for?
EQA derives from "Environmental Quality — Qualité de l'Environnement — Qualità ambientale", the title of the Imola conference proceedings from which the journal developed; the journal's full title is International Journal of Environmental Quality.

Who publishes EQA?
The Alma Mater Studiorum — University of Bologna, through AlmaDL Journals; the journal is owned by the university's Department of Agricultural and Food Sciences (DISTAL).

Is EQA open access?
Yes. It provides immediate open access under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, and authors retain copyright, according to the journal and DOAJ.

Does EQA charge authors?
No. The journal states that it has neither article processing charges nor submission processing fees, and DOAJ records no charges of either kind.

How is EQA peer reviewed?
By single anonymous (single blind) review. Papers passing an initial editorial assessment, which includes iThenticate screening, go to two external referees, and the editor decides on the basis of their comments.

How often does EQA publish?
Six times a year, with each issue updated continuously until the next volume appears, according to the journal.

Is EQA indexed in Scopus and Web of Science?
The journal's own indexing page lists Scopus and the Web of Science Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), as well as DOAJ and a range of library and discovery services.

What metrics does EQA have?
OpenAlex, at the time of checking, recorded 445 works, 1,100 citations, an h-index of 13 and an i10-index of 25 for the journal. A Journal Impact Factor could not be verified from the journal's own site or DOAJ for this profile and is therefore not stated.

When was EQA founded?
The journal grew out of annual conferences held at Imola from 2006, and its first volumes appeared in 2009, the year from which its open access record in DOAJ also runs.