Submissions

Before submitting you should read over the guidelines here, then register an account (or login if you have an existing account). Information gathered when registering with this submission system is used for publication purposes, including peer-review, typesetting and copyediting and online publication.

Submission statement of intent

Upon submitting, the article is considered under review for possible publication on the condition that it is submitted solely to UCL Open: Environment and that the article or a substantial portion of it is not under consideration and has not been published elsewhere. You can read more about these terms in our author licence agreement publicly available online at https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/ucloe/site/author-contributor-agreement.

Authors should also read through our Journal Policies carefully to ensure the submission follows the standards for publication, as outlined at https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/ucloe/site/journal-policies.

Submitting your new manuscript

New submissions are first posted online to the UCL Open: Environment preprint server for open peer review. It is important to note here that all preprint articles are deemed under review for the journal and declared as not yet peer reviewed.

Submit your manuscript as a PDF file via the ‘Start submission’ button above and complete the online form - first time users will be asked to register and verify a new account with the journal. Please also ensure you have written a covering letter to summarise key findings and contextualise your article for a multi-disciplinary audience.

The journal aims to keep submission as simple and straight forward as possible, but please make sure to read through the author guidelines to ensure you have everything included in your manuscript that is required for open peer review. After submission your manuscript will undergo assessment by a journal Editor to check for suitability, completeness, and basic scholarly integrity in line with our publishing policies. If approved for peer review the PDF file will be uploaded as a preprint article under submission to the journal and pending open peer review, on the preprint server (UCL Open: Environment Preprint). All preprint articles are assigned a Crossref DOI, and made available under a CC BY 4.0 attribution licence. The preprint article is then open to peer review.

Broad criteria for accepting, declining, and rejecting submissions

The journal accepts articles within the multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary knowledge space created by two axes, one spatial and one temporal:

Temporal: From the past (including what we can learn from the past) through to the present and out into the future (as far as we can make projections about the future,) and
Spatial: The global to local reach of societal challenges and the solutions that can help ensure that humanity can live within constraints of planetary systems.

Inter-, multi-, and trans-disciplinarity is the main but not only guide. For example, where a narrow disciplinary article that is within scope of the journal has particular features (such as being best placed in an open publishing environment rather than any other format) it may also be considered for submission. The Editorial Board may approve papers for peer review and request immediate revisions prior to any peer reviewer comments to aid peer review effectiveness. Where such requests are made, the Handling Editor will clarify the decision to revise as an open comment.

Articles accepted for full publication will be ones where the Editorial Board has decided that the submission has had two favourable reviews and authors have addressed points raised by reviewers and/or members of the Editorial Board. Experience suggests only a few submissions will move to full publication after one round of reviews. In general, the Editorial Board may decline papers for full publication where:

The paper does not meet the scope of the journal set out above
The paper lacks any conclusion and discussion about the research, particularly where any conclusions are not evidenced well or backed up by the data
Small or niche research findings, especially papers that aim to provide no or very small updates to current or previous research projects
Commercial content; marketing a product
References mainly being to the authors’ own papers (excessive self-citation)
The paper is not comprehensible for peer review
Reviewers identify issues with the submission that its authors cannot address to the satisfaction of the reviewers and/or the Editorial Board.

ORCID

We strongly encourage authors submitting to UCL Open Environment to provide their ORCID identification number during submission. ORCID (http://orcid.org) provides researchers with a unique identifier that can be kept throughout their career and can be used in publications and grant applications. ORCID distinguishes between researchers with similar names, and helps ensure that publications are attributed and recorded correctly. It also helps researchers to comply with funders’ open access requirements. Funders, such as the Wellcome Trust and the UK Research Councils, now require or recommend the use of ORCID alongside systems like Researchfish that can link with ORCID.

How do I get an ORCID?

Researchers should register for an ORCID identification number by going to http://orcid.org and following the registrations instructions. If you already have an ORCID and want to submit, review, or comment on an article, you can login via ORCID by clicking on the "Log in with ORCID" button here https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/ucloe/login or when clicking to submit to the journal.

English language

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.