Author guidelines

  1. Preparing for submission
  2. Acceptable use of AI-assisted technologies in articles
  3. Article types
  4. Formatting your manuscript
  5. Figures, tables, file size and formatting
  6. English language
  7. Data availability statement
  8. Depositing your data
  9. Image permissions and copyright
  10. Referencing style
  11. House style

Preparing for submission

We place very few restrictions on the way authors prepare their manuscript for submission and it is not necessary to try to replicate the published format of the journal (this is not a good use of a researcher’s time).

To submit, we ask only that you consider your cross-disciplinary readers and reviewers by supplying a covering letter as the first page to summarise your manuscript in a clear, generic and readable manner, and expressing possible ramifications for other areas of study. We aim to post the preprint of your manuscript directly online in the format you provide, should it be approved by the Editor.

When you are ready you can submit here:

Start Submission

Covering letter

Covering letters are welcome to be submitted with the manuscript for the Editors reference. Should you wish to provide one, please briefly summarise your manuscript, its findings, major themes, context and framing of the research, relevant discussion points and any disclosures including conflicts of interest the Editor should be aware of. The covering letter will be openly available to read as part of the submission preprint.


ORCiD

ORCiD helps researchers record and report their work by providing researchers with a personal unique identifier that can be kept throughout their career. UCL Press journals now implement ORCiD in publications and authors are encouraged to register with ORCiD and enter their ORCiD details into their submission as a URL link or ORCiD number. To register, follow the instructions on the ORCiD web pages at https://orcid.org.


Acceptable use of AI-assisted technologies in articles

Please refer to UCL Press's Principles on the use of AI-assisted technologies in articles here.

Broadly, the use of AI-assisted technologies and tools should not replace key authoring tasks and applying AI technology should be done with transparency and human oversight. All the work should be reviewed and edited carefully, because AI can generate authoritative-sounding output that can be incorrect, incomplete or biased.


Article types

We welcome submissions from all aspects of environment-related research from any discipline and strongly encourage submissions of a multi and inter-disciplinary nature that showcase radical and critical thinking on real-world problems with the aim of benefiting humanity – please see the aims and scope (https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/ucloe/site/about) for further guidance.

The list of article types below is by no means extensive or exhaustive, but rather aims to aid authors frame their article for submission to UCL Open Environment – please also refer to the journal’s editorial policies https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/ucloe/site/journal-policies for additional information before submitting.


Article type Description
Research article Detailed studies reporting research classified as primary literature. This can also include challenge and theory articles reporting research classified as primary literature, specifically showing how a certain challenge, an/or tested hypothesis/theory was investigated.
Systematic reviews A review provides critical and systematic appraisal of the current research to offer an authoritative and balanced survey of recent developments to its particular context, topic, and field. We place very few restrictions on the way authors prepare their review manuscript for submission and it is not necessary to try to replicate the published format of the journal (this is not a good use of a researcher’s time). We do recognise there exist many formal guides and formats that are currently considered best practice within a specified field be followed to improve the reporting and standards (for example, PRISMA http://www.prisma-statement.org within health care). Where a field specific guide and format should be followed, authors should therefore make clear within their article what guide has been applied alongside a reference to the applicable resource, ideally online. Any review submitted must be within scope and in keeping with the journal’s wider aims (please see the aims and scope here https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/ucloe/site/about), including clear and descriptive language for specialist and non-specialist audiences. Where this is not clearly evident, the manuscript may be declined without proceeding through open peer review.
Methodology Present a new experimental or computational method, test or procedure. The method described may either be completely new, or may offer a better version of an existing method. The article must describe a demonstrable advance on what is currently available. The method needs to have been well tested and ideally, but not necessarily, used in a way that proves its value.
Open commentary Provide further explanation on a new or existing topic as well as an article published in the journal, aimed to specifically address the key topic or subject to provide further clarification to the journals audience and literature. Provide short or technical communication on an emerging topic, might include presentation of preliminary results from both primary and secondary data.
Research protocols Demonstrates the guidelines for conducting an experiment or trial. Research protocols accepted for peer review at UCL Open Environment must have a multi-disciplinary base and illustrate what will be made in the study or experiment by explaining each essential part of it and how it is carried out. It also describes the eligibility of the materials, any participants, the length of the study or experiment, any medications or additional assets, and the related tests. Articles that do not show a multi-disciplinary base will not be accepted for peer review.
Case studies Case study articles should present a single report on a real-life, contemporary bounded system (a case) or multiple bound systems (cases) over time, with some reflection on wider implications. Case studies typically do not include a lengthy and detailed investigation in the research literature and methodology, but authors are encouraged to include sufficient detail to provide context and framing for readers.

Formatting your manuscript

Please submit your manuscript main text/body as a single Microsoft word (.DOC or .DOCX) file. The file size should not exceed 200Mb.

After initial editorial checks this file will then be converted into a PDF and posted online as a preprint to the journal’s preprint server, ready for open peer review. Please see https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/ucloe/site/how-it-works for further information about how peer review works in the journal.

Your main text/body file should include the following – which can also be used as a checklist to ensure that the manuscript has all the information necessary for successful review and publication (please also consider page and continuous line numbers):


  1. Abstract
    Present the abstract as an overview of your article (up to 250 words), giving a summary of the contents and major themes. (Note that this will ultimately be used by search engines, and it will form part of the meta-data that will be seen first by people searching your article.)

  2. Keywords
    All articles must list a maximum of up to ten key words.

  3. Main body of text
    The body of the submission should be structured in a logical and easy to follow manner (e.g. Introduction, Materials, Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusions). A clear introduction section should provide non-specialists in the subject with an understanding of the topic and a background to the issue(s) involved.

  4. Abbreviations and Acronyms
    All abbreviations and acronyms are defined in text when first introduced.

  5. Headings and Sub-headings
    Up to three level headings may be present and must be clearly identifiable using different font sizes, bold or italics. We suggest using Headings 1, 2 and 3 in MS-Word’s ‘Style’ section.

  6. Notes
    Use endnotes, not footnotes, for any additional notes and information. These appear at the end of the main text, before References. All notes should be used only where crucial clarifying information needs to be conveyed.

  7. Tables, Figures, Alt Text and Figure Captions
    These can be included within the text or can be deposited into a data repository and cited in text. Please make sure to include Alt Text for any figure, table or image included in your article (see the below section on Figures for further guidance). Data or information should not be submitted as supplementary information alongside the manuscript, but instead be included in the manuscript or deposited into a publicly available repository, depending on the type of data or information concerned.

  8. Funding and Acknowledgement Statements
    All sources of funding for the research reported should be declared, including any project codes.

  9. Authorship Contribution
    Authors are required to include an authorship statement in their article to outline how each author contributed to the article, after any acknowledgements in the article.

  10. Data availability Statement
    Please see the Data availability section for further guidance on how to include this in your manuscript.

    Please note, the journal does not accept Supporting Information or any other additional data or information submitted alongside the manuscript. All data and information should be included in the manuscript or deposited into a publicly available repository, depending on the type of data or information concerned.

  11. Declarations and Conflict of Interests Statement
    Clearly state the following in the article as sub headings:

    1. Conflicts of Interest
      Clearly declare any possible conflicts of interest, including but not limited to financial and non-financial competing interests. Where there are no conflicts of interests or competing interests, authors must clearly declare this under the same heading. For further information, please refer to the journal’s Editorial Policy at https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/ucloe/site/journal-policies

    2. Ethics Approval
      Authors are required to show in their articles that they have received ethical approval for their research from all relevant institutional review boards and that they have followed appropriate personal data protection regulations (e.g. EU General Data Protection Regulation and the UK Data Protection Act 2018) in the handling of personal data. Where such committees do not operate, authors are responsible for providing evidence of their adherence to relevant ethical guidelines for the subject. Where ethics approval is not needed a statement should be included to declare this.

    3. Consent for Publication
      For all articles involving human subjects, including any images, videos, and any other personal and identifiable information, authors must have secured informed consent to participate in the study and to publication before submitting to the journal, and a statement declaring this must be included in the article.

  12. Reference list
    UCL Open Environment follows the ‘Vancouver’ system for referencing and citation.

Figures, tables, file size and formatting

No single file should exceed 200Mb.


Figures
  • Figures should be included within the main text file in sequential order and should be set in the document as a .png file.
  • For large figures (e.g. larger than a single page), see the below heading on Very large figures and tables.
  • Figures such as graphs and charts should also be submitted as separate files during submission as an Excel file with the original data (if they were created in Excel).
  • Line art: where specialist software was used to produce any line art (e.g. diagrams, flow-charts) authors are requested to additionally submit these as individual figures as vector files (e.g. .eps or .ai).
  • Please provide a caption to label and explain each figure. If the figure is sourced from elsewhere, please provide reference to the source in the caption and reference list.

Examples of captions

Figure 1. The diagnostic first and last occurrences of Cretaceous planktonic foraminiferal species, calibrated against the most recent biostratigraphic time scale and radio-isotope data [2].

Figure 2. AN MSP dendrogram based on MSPs of the 19 species of xerophilic/xerotolerant Aspergillus, using the MALDI Biotyper Compass Explorer module. The distance level [arbitrary unit (a.u.), normalised to a max of 1000], reflects the differences between species and how related the MSPs are to one another. Clade designation based on genomic data is indicated by clade-specific colours and marked on the right-hand side of the image [16].


Alt text

As part of our commitment to accessibility, we require authors to provide alternative text – ‘alt text’ – for all figures, graphs, and images, in their article (alongside captions). Alt text describes the content of an image for those who cannot see it. This text will be embedded in the article metadata so it can be accessed via assistive technology (such as screen readers).

Please include your alt text as an additional sentence/paragraph, below each figure caption and clearly labelled.

For more information about how to write alt text and to see examples of this, please see our alt text guidelines here. For any further help, please contact us at uclpressjournals@ucl.ac.uk.


Tables

Tables should be included within the main text file. For large tables (e.g. larger than a single page), see the below heading on ‘Very large figures and tables’.


Supporting or supplementary information and data

Data or information should not be submitted as supplementary information alongside the manuscript, but instead be included in the manuscript or deposited into a publicly available repository, depending on the type of data or information concerned.

Where supporting information is included in the article that has no persistent identifier (for example, a Google survey), authors may be requested to deposit the information into a relevant data repository to ensure persistent access, assign it a DOI and then cite the DOI in the article.

Please see the below heading on ‘Depositing your data’ for further guidance.


Very large figures and tables

Where figures and data sets/tables are very large and cannot be included in the main text file as above (e.g. are larger than a single page) authors are encouraged to deposit the figure/data set/table in its original file format to a relevant data repository to assign it a DOI that can then be cited in the main text article.

If authors do not have access to a suitable data repository a request can be made to the journal to deposit the figure/data set/table into the journal’s own data repository for this purpose. To enquire and make a request, please contact the Editorial office by email at uclopen.environment@ucl.ac.uk.

Please see the below heading on ‘Depositing your data’ for further guidance.


English language

All articles published in the journal are in British English.

It is recognised that barriers might exist and impede potential authors who are not confident enough to write in English language to submit to the journal.

The Editorial Board will therefore consider the merit of the paper and not the formative language and grammar used, to encourage as much as possible non-native English language authors to submit to the journal – all accepted papers go through a high-level of copyediting and proofreading to improve the English language after editorial acceptance before official publication. Where language improvements are required, the Editorial Board should focus comments on improving the argument and clarity of results, rather than on minor grammatical errors.

It is encouraged that authors try to seek help to improve the English language when writing their manuscript by asking a native English speaking colleague to assist with checking the language quality before submission. Authors may also want to consider using a professional English language editing service to improve the level of English language before submitting, however, please note that by using professional English language editing services may incur a cost to the Author and using such a service does not guarantee acceptance of the manuscript in the journal.


Data availability statement

UCL Open Environment strongly encourages authors to make all data and datasets on which the conclusions of the manuscript rely to be publicly available either in publicly open repositories (where available and appropriate) or presented in the main paper in machine-readable format (such as formatted tables rather than flat images) whenever possible.

Authors are encouraged to follow the FAIR data principles – to make data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable.

Further information and guidance on these principles is outlined at https://www.force11.org/group/fairgroup/fairprinciples.

Authors must clearly state in their manuscript where their data are made available at time of submission. In circumstances where ethical and legal issues dictate any restrictions on sharing data (including research using personal data), a statement to this effect must be included for clarity. Where a widely established research community expectation for data archiving in public repositories exists, submission to a community-endorsed, public repository is mandatory. Persistent identifiers (such as DOIs and accession numbers) for relevant data must be provided in the manuscript as a citation/reference. For guidance on this please read the below heading on ‘Depositing your data’.

During submission, authors are required to confirm the data availability statement to indicate how fellow researchers can access their software and data and link to data sets in repositories. Authors will be required to select one of the following statements:


  1. The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the repository: *[source]
  2. The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
  3. Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
  4. All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article (and its supplementary information files).
  5. The data that support the findings of this study are available from * but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the current study, and so are not publicly available. Data are however available from the authors upon reasonable request and with permission of * [source]

* You may add a link here to your data sets and/or software at a standard data repository. We also strongly encourage you to cite your data in the reference section according to the Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles.


Depositing your data

Data has the power to revolutionise and disrupt the way societies are governed for the better. None more so than making data openly available for readers to access alongside the published research article.

Data are facts, observations or experiences on which an argument or theory is constructed or tested. Data may be numerical, descriptive, aural or visual. Data may be raw, abstracted or analysed, experimental or observational. Data include but are not limited to: laboratory notebooks; field notebooks; primary research data (including research data in hardcopy or in computer readable form); questionnaires; audiotapes; videotapes; models; photographs; films; test responses. Research collections may include slides; artefacts; specimens; samples.

Submitting authors are strongly encouraged to make freely available all data on which the conclusions of the manuscript rely on by depositing it in publicly available repositories (such as GenBank, TreeBASE, Dryad, the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity or other suitable long-term and stable public repositories) whenever possible. General repositories - for all types of research data - such as Figshare may be used where appropriate. In circumstances where ethical and legal issues dictate any restrictions on sharing data (including research using personal data) should always be considered before doing so, when storing and preserving research data. UCL Open Environment adheres to the statement: "as open as possible, as closed as necessary". For help finding relevant research data repositories please see https://repositoryfinder.datacite.org.

For more information about making data openly available please read the journal's open data policy at https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/ucloe/site/journal-policies.


Image permissions and copyright

Please ensure that where the copyright of any image or figure is used in the manuscript, appropriate permission to reuse in an open access journal publication has been obtained in writing and signed by the copyright holder. Please contact UCL Press for any questions, at uclpresspublishing@ucl.ac.uk.


Referencing style

UCL Open Environment follows the ‘Vancouver’ system for referencing and citation. We do not generally require authors to format their manuscripts in this style for peer review, so long as references and citations are written in a clear, concise and complete manner. If editorially accepted, the manuscript will go through the production process and reference and citation formatting will be applied.

See https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/libraryskills-ucl/guides-and-elearning/references-citations-and-avoiding-plagiarism#vancouver for a guide to the Vancouver reference system.


House style

The following guidelines list our preferred conventions for spelling, punctuation, abbreviations, numbers/dates, etc. Please follow them closely.


Spelling

  • Authors should consistently adopt British spelling conventions (except in quotations from other sources, where the spelling convention of the original should be retained, or where stipulated specifically in by the journal – for example World Health Organization).

Punctuation

  • Systems should consistently follow British conventions (except in quotations from other sources, where the punctuation convention of the original should be retained). British style uses single inverted commas, except for quotations within quotations (which have double inverted commas).
  • Punctuation should follow closing inverted commas (except for grammatically complete sentences beginning with a capital).
  • Punctuation should precede closing quotation marks (except for dashes, colons and semicolons, unless these are part of the quoted matter).

Hyphenation

  • Use a hyphen when two words form a compound adjective: middle-class families.
  • Hyphenation must be used consistently throughout your text.
  • Please follow Collins English Dictionary for guidance.

Contractions and abbreviations

  • If you need to use them please write in full at the first appearance with the abbreviation in brackets. You may repeat an abbreviation if it reappears later in your article.
  • Abbreviations are usually expressed without full stops, e.g. GNP, USA, PhD
  • British style contractions will have no full points (e.g. Mr, St, edn), though abbreviated words, which do not end with their final letter, will (e.g. vol., vols., ed., eds.)

Commas

  • An Oxford comma (also known as a serial comma) is a comma used after the penultimate item in a list of three or more items, before ‘and’ or ‘or’. We do not use the Oxford comma – commas should be omitted before the final ‘and’ or ‘or’. E.g. red, white and blue. The exception is if the meaning is ambiguous without one, E.g. The menu choices were fish and chips, steak and chips, or pie and mash. E.g. The dog, Jack, and Sasha.

Dashes

  • Spaced en dashes – not em dashes or hyphens – should be used.
  • Use unspaced en dashes not hyphens for ranges of pages or dates, e.g.11–12, 22–9.

Semicolons and colons

  • A semicolon should be used to separate items in a complicated list (i.e. if the items in the list have internal commas or very long descriptions), or to separate two related but grammatically independent clauses.
  • Use semicolons sparingly in the main text.
  • Colons should primarily be used to introduce block quotations or lists.

Translations

  • If quoting from a non-English source, the quotation should usually be in the original language. Give translation (either author’s or from a published translation) if reader is unlikely to understand original language. The translation should usually appear in the text in parentheses immediately following the quotation but can be given in a numbered note if preferred. Alternatively, the translation can be given in the text and the original quotation in a numbered note. You can indicate in the Preface your general editorial policy in regard to translations.

Capitalisation

  • Keep capitalisation to a minimum and use only for proper nouns and formal names of organisations, etc.

Numbers and dates

  • Spell out numbers up to but not including 10.
  • Elide numbers to minimum digits, e.g. 233-4; dates, e.g. 1993-4. Do not elide in titles and headings.
  • Centuries should be written as words not numbers, e.g. eighteenth century. Hyphenate if used as an adjective, e.g. eighteenth-century masterpiece.
  • Dates as British usage: 18 August 2015.

Quotations

  • Quotations should be indicated by single quotation marks but use double quotation marks for quotations within quotations.
  • Indent quotations of more than 50 words.
  • Quotations should remain exactly as they are in the original.


Acceptable language

Please be sensitive to the use of terms that might cause offence or be interpreted as racist or sexist. Please also avoid gender-specific pronouns where possible. Here are some examples of how to do this:

  • Use plural rather than singular pronouns in examples, e.g. ‘when children play, they…’ rather than ‘when a child plays, he…’
  • Alternate ‘he’ and ‘she’ throughout the manuscript when using a singular pronoun in examples, such that the reader perceives no bias.
  • Use ‘they’ as a singular pronoun in examples, e.g. ‘when a child plays, they…’