Submissions

Before submitting you should read over the author guidelines at https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/ucloe/site/authorguidelines, read through the below statements, 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.

Register Login

Submission statement of intent

Upon submitting, the manuscript is considered under review for possible publication on the condition that it is submitted solely to UCL Open Environment and that the manuscript, 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.


Preprints

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 It is important to note here that all preprint articles are deemed under review for the journal and declared as not yet peer reviewed.

Once you have submitted your manuscript, a journal Editor will assess it to check for suitability against the journals aims and scope, completeness, and basic scholarly integrity in line with our publishing policies.

If your submission is approved for peer review, the PDF file will be uploaded as a 'preprint article' and designated 'under submission to the journal and pending open peer review'. At this stage, the preprint article is assigned a Crossref DOI and made available under a CC BY 4.0 attribution licence.

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.

Authorship and author consent

All listed authors must have made a significant contribution to the article in the manuscript and have approved all its claims. Where necessary to clarify this, authors are required to include an authorship statement in their manuscript to outline how each author contributed to the paper, after any acknowledgements in the article – please note that this information should be removed from the main manuscript file for peer review.

UCL Press adheres to the statement of authorship as outlined by the ICMJE statement (https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/defining-the-role-of-authors-and-contributors.html), and considers an author of an article to have:


  1. made substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
  2. drafted the work or revised it critically for important intellectual content; AND
  3. made final approval of the version to be published; AND
  4. agrees to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

For suspected and incorrect authorship, UCL Press journals will refer to the UCL Press Journals Editorial Policy as outlined at https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/site/editorial_policy and follow COPE guidelines.

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.