Preparing your manuscript

Author guidelines

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). In order to submit, we ask only that you consider your cross-disciplinary readers and reviewers by supplying a cover letter as 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. The following can 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):

• Covering letter to the Editor as first page (see below section on how to write a covering letter)
• Abstract (up to 250 words).
• Keywords (up to 10 keywords).
• Main body of text (e.g. Introduction, Materials, Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusions).
• All abbreviations are defined.
• 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.
• Tables, Figures and Figure captions
  These can be included within the text or can be deposited into a data repository and cited in text. For supporting or supplementary information and data, see below.
• Funding and Acknowledgement statements
  All sources of funding for the research reported should be declared, including any project codes.
• 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.
• Data availability statement (see below).
• Declarations and Conflict of Interests statementClearly state the following in the article as sub headings:
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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.
• Supporting Information (including supplementary information and appendices, see below)
• A full reference list.

Article types

Find more information about what you can submit for publication at https://ucl-about.scienceopen.com/article-type-descriptions. 

Covering letter

To better engage all users and consumers of research, we ask authors to include a covering letter attached as first page to the manuscript PDF file to demonstrate how the contribution may improve and add to the corpus of knowledge in the field and to clarify the subject base and link to the focus of environment (i.e. how do you meet the scope of environment related research). This statement should be written in language suitable for non-discipline experts and the wider public to understand.

The cover letter should also include the following information:

• Summarize the papers contribution to the scientific literature;
• Relate the study to other previously published work;
• Specify the type of article (for example, research article, open commentary, data note, systematic review, etc).

Please do not include any preferred or opposed reviewer information in the letter. If you do not include a covering letter or a statement of robustness, you may be requested to include it before proceeding with peer review.

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.

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. Read more about the journals open data policy at https://ucl-about.scienceopen.com/open-data.

Supporting Information

Data or information should not be submitted as supplementary information alongside the manuscript, but instead be included either as an appendix to the manuscript that forms part of the paper 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, have it registered to a DOI, and cite the DOI in the article.

Image permissions and copyright

Please ensure that where any copyrighted 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 teh Editorial Office with any questions at uclopen.environment@ucl.ac.uk.