COVID-19 interactions with our Environment

Call for Papers and Invitation to join our Synthetic Effort and Debate on Shaping the Future during and after the current pandemic

Submit here Read the articles here

UCL Open: Environment is running this on-going call for papers concerned with the effects on the environment that are and will be consequential on the societal restrictions and subsequent recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Submissions may be research articles directly concerned with environmental issues (such as those linked to air quality or environmental noise or biodiversity – including its consumption or human ecology) or ones that address strategic, policy or operational matters at the interface of disease and the environment, as well as social implications of the pandemic and the environmental changes connected to it. Papers should be strongly interdisciplinary either in terms of the author’s skill sets or subject matter. Discussion and research papers are equally welcome.

We already know something about how the pandemic and the response to it is affecting the environment but we want to help draw together what is known, what is being learnt and begin that debate on the implications the pandemic has for people’s intersections with the environment and further what this might mean for the vulnerability and resilience we need to tackle the SDGs and make the world a better place.

Submission

Submission is open to anyone. For more information or to enquire about submission, please contact the Editors at uclopen.environment@ucl.ac.uk.

Authors should read through the journals author guidelines and publishing policies before submitting. Once you are ready to submit, please ensure that you have signed into My ScienceOpen with your ORCID ID to complete the submission form.

All published articles (after peer review and editorial acceptance) in this series will be additionally indexed in PubMed Central as part of the Public Health Emergency COVID-19 Initiative.

UCL Press offers waivers and discounts for Article-Processing Charges (APCs) including for articles whose corresponding authors are based in low-income countries (see here for more information). Authors are requested to contact the Editorial office (uclopen.environment@ucl.ac.uk) prior to submission to enquire and request these discounts. Please note that authors ability to pay any charges regarding to publication are kept separate to editorial review and Editors are not responsible for determining these waivers and discounts.

Note about data

Prior to submission, all authors should ensure that the data relied upon for the paper are either deposited in publicly available repositories (for example, such as GenBank, TreeBASE, Dryad, the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity or other suitable long-term and stable public repositories, see below notice on data repositories) whenever possible, or have included in the main text for open peer review.

For further information, including about FAIR data sharing, UCL have prepared some useful information about when, where, and how to share data as openly as possible, here https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/research-support/research-data-management/best-practices/how-guides/sharing-data.

General repositories – for all types of research data (such as Figshare) – may be used where appropriate. UCL authors are encouraged to use the UCL Research Data Repository (please see https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/research-support/research-data-management/ucl-research-data-repository)

Editorial article

The following editorial article by the Series Editors Dr Francesco Aletta and Prof Dan Osborn provides the context for this call:

Editorial: The COVID-19 global challenge and its implications for the environment – what we are learning

Authors: Dr Francesco Aletta, Prof Dan Osborn
Published: 12 May 2020

Series Editors

Dr Francesco Aletta, Research Associate, Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering, UCL, UK
Prof Julien S Baker, Head of Department, Sport, Physical Education and Health, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong
Prof Dan Osborn, Chair of Human Ecology, Earth Sciences, UCL, UK

Read the articles

All articles will appear in the article list as and when they are submitted and subsequently officially published after open peer review. Articles will firstly appear as preprint articles whilst under open peer review being updated when revised by the authors as requested by the series Editors.

Review for us

If you are interested in contributing to this special series as a potential reviewer, please contact the series Editors with a brief outline of your interest and area of expertise, to uclopen.environment@ucl.ac.uk.

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How it works

Operating dually as an open access e-journal and offering immediate publication in a dedicated preprint server, with open peer review, the entire publishing process will be accessible, transparent and accountable.

Related series’

This miniseries on COVID-19 and mental health publishes 5 research articles and their related discussant articles, reporting on the data from the UCL-Penn Global COVID Study, Lessons from COVID-19: Reflections, Resilience and Recovery.

People’s wellbeing is intimately linked to their environment including the place in which they live. This series will build towards examining some of the linkages that have been exposed during the COVID-19 pandemic and some of these findings will likely read across to the journals broader special series on COVID-19 interactions with our environment.