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About Carbon Balance and Management

Aims and scope | Open access | Article-processing charges | Indexing services | Publication and peer review process | Editorial policies | Citing articles in Carbon Balance and Management | Why publish your article in Carbon Balance and Management?

This page includes information about the aims and scope of Carbon Balance and Management, editorial policies, open access and article-processing charges, the peer review process and other information. For details of how to prepare and submit a manuscript through the online submission system, please see the instructions for authors.

Aims & scope

Carbon Balance and Management is an open access, peer-reviewed online journal that encompasses all aspects of research aimed at developing a comprehensive policy relevant to the understanding of the global carbon cycle.

The global carbon cycle involves important couplings between climate, atmospheric CO2 and the terrestrial and oceanic biospheres. The current transformation of the carbon cycle due to changes in climate and atmospheric composition is widely recognized as potentially dangerous for the biosphere and for the well-being of humankind, and therefore monitoring, understanding and predicting the evolution of the carbon cycle in the context of the whole biosphere (both terrestrial and marine) is a challenge to the scientific community.

This demands interdisciplinary research and new approaches for studying geographical and temporal distributions of carbon pools and fluxes, control and feedback mechanisms of the carbon-climate system, points of intervention and windows of opportunity for managing the carbon-climate-human system.

Carbon Balance and Management is a medium for researchers in the field to convey the results of their research across disciplinary boundaries. Through this dissemination of research, the journal aims to support the work of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) and to provide governmental and non-governmental organizations with instantaneous access to continually emerging knowledge, including paradigm shifts and consensual views.

Open access

All articles published by Carbon Balance and Management are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication, without subscription charges or registration barriers. Further information about open access can be found here.

Authors of articles published in Carbon Balance and Management are the copyright holders of their articles and have granted to any third party, in advance and in perpetuity, the right to use, reproduce or disseminate the article, according to the BioMed Central copyright and license agreement.

Article-processing charges

Open access publishing is not without costs. Carbon Balance and Management therefore levies an article-processing charge of £1115/$1715/€1310 for each article accepted for publication. We routinely waive charges for authors from low-income countries. Generally, if the submitting author's institution is a Member the cost of the article-processing charge is covered by the membership, and no further charge is payable. In the case of authors whose institutions are Supporter Members, however, a discounted article-processing charge is payable by the author. For further details, see our article-processing charge page. A limited number of waivers for article-processing charges are also available at the editors' discretion, and authors wishing to apply for these waivers should contact the editors.

Indexing services

All articles published in Carbon Balance and Management are included in PubMed, the most widely used biomedical bibliographic database service, which is run by the US National Library of Medicine. Other bibliographic databases that index articles published in Carbon Balance and Management include:

  • Agricola
  • CABI
  • CAS
  • Citebase
  • Embase
  • EmBiology
  • Global Health
  • Google Scholar
  • Index Copernicus
  • OAIster
  • PubMed
  • PubMed Central
  • SCImago
  • Scirus
  • Scopus
  • SOCOLAR
  • Zetoc

The full text of all research articles is deposited in PubMed Central, the US National Library of Medicine's full-text repository of life science literature, and other digital archives including e-Depot (The Netherlands).

Carbon Balance and Management has an unofficial Impact Factor of 2.2. BioMed Central is working with Thomson Reuters (ISI) to ensure that citation analysis of articles published in Carbon Balance and Management will be available.

Publication and peer review process

Criteria for publication

Carbon Balance and Management considers the following types of articles:

  • Research - this is a section for publishing research results, short papers that present conceptual advances, discoveries, innovations in research techniques and methods.
  • Methodology articles - this is a section for publishing progress reports, short papers (less than 2000 words) that focus on recently published series of papers that are setting a new research framework in a particular field of carbon cycle studies. A progress report is a self-review of the author's achievements related to a single topical aspect of the field rather than a survey of the author's publications.
  • Review articles - this is a section for publishing collective views, papers that present a consensus on a framework for coordinated research, or on the state of the art in a particular field of global carbon cycle studies. They should not focus on the author's own work and should not exceed 3000 words.
  • Commentary articles - this is a section for publishing persuasive and controversial comments on research results published in Carbon Balance Management. They should be understandable to readers who are not researchers themselves but who are interested in research. They are usually 500 words.

Peer-review policies

Manuscripts submitted through the online submission system are assigned to a Handling Editor, who will be a member of the Editorial Board. The Handling Editor is responsible for sending the manuscript to three anonymous reviewers. Based on the reviewers’ reports, the Handling Editor will assess whether the manuscript is suitable for publication, with the final Editorial decision resting upon the Editor-in-Chief. The target of the peer-review system is to reach a fast editorial decision, aiming to publish manuscripts that meet the required standard within three months from submission.

Authors will be able to check the progress of their manuscript through the submission system at any time by logging into My Carbon Balance and Management, a personalized section of the site.

Reprints

High-quality, bound reprints can be purchased for all articles published. Please see our reprints website for further information about ordering reprints.

Supplements

Carbon Balance and Management will consider supplements based on proceedings (full articles or meeting abstracts), reviews or research. All articles submitted for publication in supplements are subject to peer review. Published supplements are fully searchable and freely accessible online and can also be produced in print. All full length articles (proceedings, reviews or research articles) are indexed by PubMed. PubMed displays the title of the supplement only in the case of meeting abstract collections. For further information, please contact us.

Editorial policies

All manuscripts submitted to Carbon Balance and Management should adhere to BioMed Central's editorial policies.

Citing articles in Carbon Balance and Management

Articles in Carbon Balance and Management should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal. Because articles are not printed, they do not have page numbers; instead, they are given a unique article number.

Article citations follow this format:

Authors: Title. Carbon Balance Manage [year], [volume number]:[article number].

e.g. Roberts LD, Hassall DG, Winegar DA, Haselden JN, Nicholls AW, Griffin JL: Increased hepatic oxidative metabolism distinguishes the action of Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor delta from Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor gamma in the Ob/Ob mouse. Carbon Balance Manage 2009, 1:115.

refers to article 115 from Volume 1 of the journal.

Why publish your article in Carbon Balance and Management?

High visibility

Carbon Balance and Management's open access policy allows maximum visibility of articles published in the journal as they are available to a wide, global audience. Articles that have been especially highly accessed are highlighted with a 'Highly accessed' graphic, which appears on the journal's contents pages and search results.

Speed of publication

Carbon Balance and Management offers a fast publication schedule whilst maintaining rigorous peer review; all articles must be submitted online, and peer review is managed fully electronically (articles are distributed in PDF form, which is automatically generated from the submitted files). Articles are published with their final citation immediately upon acceptance in a provisional PDF form. The article will subsequently be published in both fully browsable web form, and as a formatted PDF; the article will then be available through Carbon Balance and Management, BioMed Central and PubMed Central and will also be included in PubMed.

Flexibility

Online publication in Carbon Balance and Management gives authors the opportunity to publish large datasets, large numbers of color illustrations and moving pictures, to display data in a form that can be read directly by other software packages so as to allow readers to manipulate the data for themselves, and to create all relevant links (for example, to PubMed, to sequence and other databases, and to other papers).

Promotion and press coverage

Articles published in Carbon Balance and Management are included in article alerts and regular email updates. Some may be included in abstract books mailed to academics and are highlighted on Carbon Balance and Management's pages and on the BioMed Central homepage.

In addition, articles published in Carbon Balance and Management may be promoted by press releases to the general or scientific press. These activities increase the exposure and number of accesses for articles published in Carbon Balance and Management. A list of articles recently press-released by journals published by BioMed Central is available here.

Authors of articles published in Carbon Balance and Management retain the copyright of their articles and are free to reproduce and disseminate their work (for further details, see the BioMed Central copyright and license agreement).

For further information about the advantages of publishing in a journal from BioMed Central, please click here.