About Environmental Research: Ecology

Environmental Research: Ecology™ is a multidisciplinary, open access journal devoted to addressing important global challenges at the interface of environmental science, large scale ecology, biodiversity and conservation in a way that bridges scientific progress and assessment with efforts relating to impacts of global change, resilience, mitigation and adaptation in the broadest sense.

A specific goal of the journal is to provide a forum to promote dialogue between environmental scientists, ecologists, resource managers and policy makers. All research methodologies are encouraged comprehensively covering qualitative, quantitative, experimental, theoretical and applied approaches to the field.

Particular topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• Applied ecology and the management of biological resources (including wildlife and habitat management, land use and management, aquatic resources, restoration ecology);
• Theoretical ecology and modelling;
• Biodiversity and species abundance;
• Conservation (including planning and risk assessment);
• Animal ecology;
• Microbial ecology;
• Evolution ecology;
• Chemical and molecular ecology;
• Marine ecology;
• Behavioural ecology;
• Remote sensing and ecology;
• Ecosystems and biospheres as complex adaptive systems;
• Tools and computational methods to study ecological systems (including AI, informatics and Big Data);
• Ecology and society.

• Broad multidisciplinary scope: a broad scope that brings together all communities working on global challenges relating to the environment, ecology, biodiversity and conservation.
• Open access: all articles are published under a CC BY licence, enabling immediate and perpetual access, and permitting the widest possible dissemination and reuse of content.
• High quality standards: with strict editorial criteria aimed at publishing only work that makes a major advance in a specialist field.
• High quality peer review: adopting the same high level of service as Environmental Research Letters (including Transparent Peer Review), all articles are rigorously peer reviewed by IOP Publishing’s global network of expert reviewers, supported by the journal’s diverse Editorial Board.
• Fast publication: committed to providing a fast, professional service to ensure rapid first decision and publication. acceptance and publication. Once accepted, articles will be accessible to readers within 24 hours with a citable DOI.
• Article flexibility: a comprehensive range of article classifications aimed at serving and representing a broad audience extending to academia, industry and government.
• Pre-print friendly: authors are encouraged to post on community pre-print platforms.
• Data and code: authors are encouraged to include relevant citable datasets and programmable code in line with IOP Publishing’s data availability policy.
• Society owned: IOP Publishing is a leading society publisher and profits generated are invested in the Institute of Physics, helping to support science research, education and outreach around the world.

Environmental Research: Ecology welcomes submissions of the following article types:

• Papers: Articles of unlimited length that report quality original research with conclusions representing a significant advance in the field.
• Letters: Outstanding concise articles, reporting important, new and timely developments. These articles should be deserving of priority review, and you are required to upload a justification statement along with your submission. As a guide, Letters should not generally be more than eight journal pages (or around 4500 words) in length.
• Topical Reviews: Written by leading researchers in their fields, these articles present the background to and overview of a particular field, and the current state of the art. Topical review articles are normally invited by the Editorial Board.
• Special issue papers: Research papers published as part of a guest-edited collection centred around an emerging and highly topical field.
• Roadmaps: Broad, multi-author reviews in which leaders in the field discuss the latest developments and future research directions.
• Perspectives: Commentaries on the impact of previously published work, or authoritative discussions on the future direction of a field, that are of notable interest to the community.
• Comments and replies: Comments on, or criticisms of, work previously published in the journal. The authors of the original article will be invited to submit a reply.

Environmental Research: Ecology has no subscription charges and the costs of publication are fully funded by article publication charges (APCs).

As part of our commitment to open science, IOP Publishing is covering the article publication charge (APC) for all articles published in the journal. The list prices shown below will not be charged if your article is accepted for publication.

*excluding VAT where applicable

**eligibility criteria can be found here

APCs only apply to articles accepted for publication; there are no submission charges.

There are no other charges for publishing in Environmental Research: Ecology.

Transformative Agreements

Environmental Research: Ecology is included in our transformative agreements which allow authors from some institutions to publish open access without paying an APC.

Find out if you’re covered by an agreement

If you are covered by an agreement, use our author guide to help you submit your paper.

Countries where we have transformative agreements include:
Austria, Canada, Croatia, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Germany, Poland, The Netherlands, United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Slovenia, Sweden and Switzerland.

Paying for open access

Various discounts, waivers and funding arrangements are available to support our authors. Visit our Paying for open access page for further details.

We work with our authors to help make their work as easy to discover as possible. Articles published in Environmental Research: Ecology will be available in relevant indexing services and databases when appropriate.