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Preparing your materials

Policy on prior publication

When authors submit manuscripts to this journal, these manuscripts should not be under consideration, accepted for publication or in press within a different journal, book or similar entity, unless explicit permission or agreement has been sought from all entities involved. However, deposition of a preprint on the author’s personal website, in an institutional repository, or in a preprint archive shall not be viewed as prior or duplicate publication. Authors should follow the Cambridge University Press Preprint Policy regarding preprint archives and maintaining the version of record. 

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Submission of Manuscripts and Peer Review

All new submissions should be submitted online here.

Global Sustainability uses a single-anonymous peer review process. Submitted manuscripts are reviewed by a member of the Editorial Board and at least two reviewers. Interdisciplinary articles will be handled by each relevant Section Editor with final decisions to publish being taken by one or both of the Deputy Editors with the agreement of Editor-in-Chief.

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Scope

The journal will publish a wide range of science and social science research addressing issues of broad relevance and applicability, with a particular emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches. Research can address global effects or make connections between local and global scales. Articles may:

  • enhance the understanding of natural and human environments and systems;
  • analyse and predict environment changes and the consequences of those changes;
  • provide demonstrations of practical approaches to preventing, ameliorating or adapting to the detrimental effects of climate change and other human activities.

Primary research articles will typically provide new insights. Datasets and methodologies will also be considered on their own merit if they provide a significant benefit to other researchers.

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Subject Categories

During submission, authors must clearly indicate which of the below subject categories they are submitting their article under (max. 3 categories). All articles, no matter what the article type, should be submitted under a subject category. If authors are uncertain under which category to submit their article, they should contact the journal’s editorial office at gsus@cambridge.org.

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Natural environments and systemsHuman activities and infrastructureSocial effects and management
Ecosystem services Pollution and waste management Policies, politics and governance
Planetary boundaries and resilienceEnergy (production, transport and conservation)Human behaviour
Earth systems (land, water and atmospheric)Land, ocean and freshwater usePopulation growth and migration
Natural resources (biological and non-biological)Agriculture and fisheriesSocial and economic value
Ecology & biodiversityFood and water securityAdaptation and mitigation
Effects of climate changeTechnologies (applications and effects)Auditing of management
Urban systemsIndustry (manufacturing, material efficiencies and transport)Planning and design
Modelling and simulation
System control and optimisation
Communication and education
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Themed Collections

The journal will also regularly publish themed collections of content. If your article is being submitted in response to a Call for Papers for a themed collection, please indicate this in the cover letter upon submission.

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Article Types

Article TypeLimitsDetails
Long form Research Papers
Papers should be as concise as clarity permits and in general we would expect articles not to exceed 7,000 words not counting title, abstract, text boxes, figures, tables and references. This category is intended for full-scale research studies that fit within the journal’s scope.
Research ReportThis category is designed for concisely written research reports (1500 words) for which rapid publication is considered desirable.Research report will follow a streamlined schedule and will normally be published within three months of submission. To meet this schedule, authors will be required to make revisions with minimal delay.
Review PapersThe length of the Review article will depend on the scope of the subject area and its topicality, but generally articles should not exceed 8000 words for the main text, and 150 references.Reviews provide a comprehensive assessment of a particular topic or research area. They may provide interdisciplinary syntheses and can provide strong conclusions relevant to future research, policy or other societal implications. These articles should provide a comprehensive assessment of a particular topic or research area of broad interest.
Intelligence Briefings These can be short reflections or longer perspective pieces. They should not surpass the limit of 3000 words in the text, not counting title, abstract, text boxes, figures, tables and references. Intelligence Briefings situate new findings within authoritative, agenda-setting, lively articles addressing topical issues of global significance aimed at a policy audience. We invite papers that address academic debate concerning controversial issues. This should be a common space that fosters debate. They will highlight societal implications and encourage social transformations. For all types of Intelligence briefings we encourage authors to contact the journal’s editorial office at gsus@cambridge.org to discuss a potential submission.

Global Sustainability welcomes post- publication debate on these pieces in the form of commentaries and/or Intelligence Briefings that provide a different perspective on the issue reflected upon in the original Intelligence Briefing. See more detail on the submission process and formatting of these in the section below.
CommentariesCommentaries are flexible in format but should generally be limited to 1500 words, without figures.Commentaries are opinion papers related to topical issues in sustainability. They can be written in response to other articles published by the journal (readers are encouraged to submit these as soon as possible), or they can be viewpoints on important sustainability matters and related discussions. Commentaries will be subject to review by Global Sustainability editorial team. 
Concepts and PerspectivesThese can be up to 5,000 words in lengthConcepts and perspectives are intendent to be either or more forward looking, speculative, and/or opinionated than regular research reports. But in contrast to Commentaries, they provide more substance and are more firmly embedded in relevant research frontiers. Although being thought-provoking and stimulating new debates are core concepts for this category, being balanced, fair and sensible in subject and style is nonetheless a requirement. Articles in this category will normally undergo full peer review, but on occasion will be peer reviewed by the editorial team.
EditorialThey should be limited to 2 pages.Editorials are usually written by the editorial team, or by Guest Editors to introduce a special collection.

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Manuscript Preparation

Title page

The title page should include:

  1. The title of the article, which should be short but informative and accurately reflect the content;
  2. Authors’ names and contact details: please list a brief affiliation for each author including country (assigned with superscript numbers) below the author names, and in addition, indicate the corresponding author with an asterisk and in this case provide an email address;
  3. Word count, including all text but excluding tables, figures and references.

Abstract (These are not mandatory in Intelligence Briefings)

Abstracts must be structured into two parts, with subheadings. The first part, the Non-Technical Summary (100 words max) should outline the article for a lay audience by giving context and significance of the work against the problem being addressed.

The Technical Summary (200 words max) should then follow as a traditional abstract, summarizing the background, findings, and implications of the work. The Technical Summary should not duplicate the text of the Non-Technical Summary, but should instead provide a more detailed description of the work.

Social Media summary

Please include a summary of your article in 120 characters or less for use in social media promotion.

Text

All manuscripts should be submitted with line numbers to make the peer review an easier task to all involved.

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Figures and tables

For guidance on producing figures and tables, please visit the Cambridge Journals Artwork guide: https://www.cambridge.org/core...

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References

References and citations should be formatted correctly in journal style when the article is submitted to the journal but formatting is not grounds for rejection at the submitting phase.

References in text should be cited by the author(s) surname(s) and the year of publication (e.g. Smith, 2012). References with two authors should be cited with both surnames (e.g. Smith & Wright, 2013). References with three or more authors should be cited with the first author followed by et al. (in italics; e.g. Smith et al.). The references section should be in alphabetical order by the first author's surname. 

Please follow the APA citation style. Find here Zotero style by searching APA 6th edition.  

‘Unpublished observations’ and ‘personal communications’ may not be used as references, although references to written, not oral, communications may be inserted (in parentheses) in the text. Include among the references articles accepted but not yet published, or published online only (please supply Digital Object Identifier [DOI] reference, if known); designate the journal and add ‘(in press)’. For in press citations, an acceptance letter from the publisher will be required. Information from manuscripts submitted but not yet accepted should be cited in the text as ‘unpublished observations’.

The references must be verified by the author(s) against the original documents. Research articles should not exceed 75 references in the main text, and reviews should not exceed 150 references.  

Global Sustainability can publish endnotes, but not footnotes.

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ORCID IDs

Global Sustainability now requires that all corresponding authors identify themselves using ORCID when submitting a manuscript to the journal. Joining ORCID is fast, free and you do not need to have a current affiliation. ORCID provides a unique identifier for researchers and, through integration in key research workflows such as publication and grant applications, provides the following benefits:

  • Discoverability: ORCID increases the discoverability of your publications, by enabling smarter publisher systems and by helping readers to reliably find work that you’ve authored.
  • Convenience: As more organisations use ORCID, providing your ID or using it to register for services will automatically link activities to your ORCID profile, and will save you re-keying information multiple times.
  • Keeping track: Your ORCID profile is a neat place to record and display (if you choose) validated information about your research activities.


If you don’t already have an ID, you’ll need to create one if you decide to submit a manuscript to Global Sustainability. You can register for one directly from your user account on ScholarOne or Editorial Manager or via https://orcid.org/register. If you already have an ID, please use this when submitting by linking it to your ScholarOne user account. Simply log in to your account using your normal username and password. Edit your account by clicking on your name at the top right of the screen and from the dropdown menu, select 'E-Mail / Name'. Follow the instructions at the top of the screen to update your account.

For more information read this.

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Required Statements

The five sections below must be included. Please check you have included all of these statements at the end of the manuscript, before the References section.

1) Acknowledgements

You may acknowledge individuals or organisations that provided advice, support (non-financial). Formal financial support and funding should be listed in the Financial Support section (see below).

2) Author Contributions

A short statement should be provided indicating how each author contributed to the work. For example: AB and CD conceived and designed the study. CD and EF conducted data gathering. GH performed statistical analyses. AB, EF and GH wrote the article.

3) Financial Support

Please provide details of the sources of financial support for all authors, including grant numbers. For example, "This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (grant number XXXXXXX)". Multiple grant numbers should be separated by a comma and space, and where research was funded by more than one agency the different agencies should be separated by a semi-colon, with 'and' before the final funder. Grants held by different authors should be identified as belonging to individual authors by the authors' initials. For example, "This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (A.B., grant numbers XXXX, YYYY), (C.D., grant number ZZZZ); the Natural Environment Research Council (E.F., grant number FFFF); and the Australian Research Council (A.B., grant number GGGG), (E.F., grant number HHHH)".

Where no specific funding has been provided for research, please provide the following statement: "This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial or not-for-profit sectors."

4) Conflicts of Interest Declarations

• Authors should include a Conflicts of Interest declaration in their manuscript. If authors do not include this, their submission will not proceed to peer review. 

• Conflicts of Interest are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on an author’s presentation of their work. They may include, but are not limited to, financial, professional, contractual or personal relationships or situations. 

• Conflicts of Interest do not necessarily mean that an author’s work has been compromised. Authors should declare any real or perceived Conflicts of Interest in order to be transparent about the context of their work. 

• If the manuscript has multiple authors, the author submitting the manuscript must include Conflicts of Interest declarations relevant to all contributing authors. 

• Example wording for a Conflicts of Interest declaration is as follows: “Conflicts of Interest: Author A is employed at company B. Author C owns shares in company D, is on the Board of company E and is a member of organisation F. Author G has received grants from company H.” If no Conflicts of Interest exist, the declaration should state “Conflicts of Interest: Author A and Author B declare none”.

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5) Data Availability

Authors must follow the journal’s policy for supporting research transparency and reproducibility.Authors must make all data, materials, protocols and software available to readers without undue barriers to access.

A data availability statement should be included and provide URLs for any available datasets or code.

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Publishing Ethics

Global Sustainability considers all manuscripts on the strict condition that:

  1. The manuscript is your own original work, and does not duplicate any other previously published work;
  2. The manuscript has been submitted only to the journal - it is not under consideration, accepted for publication or in press elsewhere. Manuscripts may be deposited on pre-print servers;
  3. All listed authors know of and agree to the manuscript being submitted to the journal; and
  4. The manuscript contains nothing that is abusive, defamatory, fraudulent, illegal, libellous, or obscene.
The journal adheres to the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines on research and publications ethics.

Text taken directly or closely paraphrased from earlier published work that has not been acknowledged or referenced will be considered plagiarism. Submitted manuscripts in which such text is identified will be withdrawn from the editorial process.

Please visit here for information on our ethical guidelines.

Ethical Standards

All Cambridge journals adhere to a set of Ethical Standards, as laid out here.

Where research involves human and/or animal experimentation, the following statements should be included (as applicable): "The authors assert that all procedures contributing to this work comply with the ethical standards of the relevant national and institutional committees on human experimentation and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2008." and "The authors assert that all procedures contributing to this work comply with the ethical standards of the relevant national and institutional guides on the care and use of laboratory animals."

We take issues of copyright infringement, plagiarism, or other breaches of best practice in publication very seriously.  Text taken directly or closely paraphrased from earlier published work that has not been acknowledged or referenced will be considered plagiarism.  Submitted manuscripts in which such text is identified will be withdrawn from the editorial process. If a concern is raised about possible plagiarism in an article submitted to or published in the journal, this will be investigated fully and dealt with in accordance with the COPE guidelines. If needed the manuscript can be processed by iThenticate.

Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Tools

We acknowledge the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in research and writing processes. In this section we explain how to declare the use of AI tools in an accountable and transparent way, in accordance with the Cambridge University Press Research Publishing Ethics Guidelines. 

Authorship 

We do not consider artificial intelligence (AI) tools to meet the accountability requirements of authorship, and therefore generative AI tools such as ChatGPT should not be listed as authors on any submitted content.

Credit and citation

All use of AI-generated content must comply with our plagiarism policy and best practices regarding citation and acknowledgement. 

You must not present ideas, words, data, or other material originally produced by third parties without appropriate acknowledgement or permission.

Transparency: declaration and description

We outline below the forms of AI use that must be declared and described to readers, as well as where and how to do this within your manuscript.

What to declare

You should always declare and describe your use of an AI tool if you have used it to generate text or images (this includes the translation of sources or of your own work) or to analyse or extract insights from data or other materials. 

Minimal and non-generative uses of AI tools in manuscript preparation do not require declaration. For instance, basic spelling or language checking, incorporation of single words or brief phrases, or minor formatting tasks such as converting section headers to bold type. It is important to note that accountability for the use of AI tools, including minimal and non-generative ones, rests with the author. Caution should be used in all cases and it is important to check your article thoroughly for unintended consequences, particularly in relation to the references.

If you are unsure about whether a particular use of an AI tool requires declaration, please contact the journal’s editorial office. 

Where to declare

Use of AI tools should be declared in your manuscript in the same way that you would declare your use of other tools and assistance.

  • If you have used AI tools to generate text within your manuscript, this should be declared in the same way you would declare your use of other language-editing services, for example in a separate acknowledgments section or in a footnote.
  • If you have used AI tools to collect or analyse data, the way you have done this should be described in your methods section or general description of your methodology, in the same way you would describe your use of other software or analysis processes.
  • If you have used AI tools to generate visual content that appears in your manuscript, this should be declared in the captions of any figures that you have generated or modified using AI tools.

This ensures your declarations appear where readers, editors, and reviewers naturally expect to find information about tools and processes used in your work.

How to declare

Descriptions of your use of AI tools should include:

  • the name and version of the tool you used
  • the date(s) you used the tool for the purpose(s) described, to the extent reasonably possible
  • how the tool can be accessed or used by others, to the extent reasonably possible
  • a full description of how you used the tool
  • appropriate citations to any third-party text, datasets or other material used or included in the tool’s output.

Additionally, as appropriate, descriptions should include:

  • any proprietary information relevant to the use of the tool
  • any ways in which you modified the version of the tool that you used (such as training it on your own data)
  • any competing interests or potential bias that should be considered as a consequence of the tool’s use, including as a result of its ownership or development.


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Supplementary Material

Additional material (e.g. data sets, large tables) relevant to the article can be submitted with your manuscript for publication online, where they are made available via a link from the article. The article should stand alone without these data. Supplementary Material must be cited in a relevant place in the text of the article.

Please note that (unlike figures included in the printed article) captions or legends should be included for all figures and tables in Supplementary Material. You should number figures or tables with the prefix ‘S’, e.g. Supplementary Figure S1, Supplementary Table S1. Colour images for online publication as Supplementary Material must be saved in RGB format (not CMYK).

Supplementary materials will be published with the same metadata as your parent article, and are considered a formal part of the academic record, so cannot be retracted or modified other than via our article correction processes. Supplementary materials will not be typeset or copyedited, so should be supplied exactly as they are to appear online. Please make sure you are familiar with our detailed guidance on supplementary materials prior to submission.

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Journal Style

Authors should note the following:

  • S.I. units should be used throughout in text, figures and tables.
  • Authors should spell out in full any abbreviations used in their manuscripts.
  • Foreign quotations and phrases should be followed by a translation.
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Copyright

The policy of Global Sustainability is that authors (or in some cases their employers) retain copyright and grant Cambridge University Press a non-exclusive licence to publish their work. Authors must complete and return an author publishing agreement form as soon as their article has been accepted for publication; the journal is unable to publish without this. Please download the appropriate publishing agreement here.

The form also sets out the Creative Commons licence under which the article is made available to end users: a fundamental principle of open access is that content should not simply be accessible but should also be freely re-usable. Articles will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY) by default. This means that the article is freely available to read, copy and redistribute, and can also be adapted (users can “remix, transform, and build upon” the work) for any commercial or non-commercial purpose, as long as proper attribution is given. Authors can, in the publishing agreement form, choose a different kind of Creative Commons license (including those prohibiting non-commercial and derivative use) if they prefer.

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Open Access

Open access publishing in Global Sustainability is funded through levying an article processing charge (APC) which can be paid by the corresponding author, their institution or their funding body. Please see here for more details.

From 2019 onwards, an APC will apply to all accepted articles, with a continuing automatic waiver scheme for World Bank designated Low and Middle Income Countries. Other authors who are unable to pay the APC in full or part will be able to request a discount or waiver from Cambridge University Press, and some evidence for lack of funds may be required.

You might also qualify for free open access publication through one of our Read and Publish Deals (we've partnered with over 1,000 institutions across the globe) - you can check if you're eligible via the tracker on our Read and Publish Agreements Page. 

The decision whether to accept an article for publication will rest solely with the Editors, and without reference to the funding situation of the authors. Please note: APC collection is managed by RightsLink, who will contact authors following acceptance of their article. 

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Author Language Services

Cambridge recommends that authors have their manuscripts checked by an English language native speaker before submission; this will ensure that submissions are judged at peer review exclusively on academic merit. We list a number of third-party services specialising in language editing and/or translation, and suggest that authors contact as appropriate. Use of any of these services is voluntary, and at the author's own expense.

Further Details

For further information on this journal, please see our Production FAQs.

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Digital Preservation Policy

Cambridge University Press publications are deposited in the following digital archives to guarantee long-term digital preservation:

  • CLOCKSS (journals) 
  • Portico (journals and books)