About Carbon Balance and Management

What is Carbon Balance and Management?

Carbon Balance and Management is an open access, peer-reviewed online journal that encompasses all aspects of research aimed developing a comprehensive, policy relevant 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.

Content overview

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.

Edited by Georgii Alexandrov, Robert Dickinson and Takehisa Oikawa, Carbon Balance and Management is supported by an international Editorial Board.

Publishing in Carbon Balance and Management

All articles will be listed in PubMed immediately upon acceptance (after peer review), and will be covered by PubMed Central and Embase.

Articles in Carbon Balance and Management should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal. However, because articles in this journal are not printed, they do not have page numbers. Instead, they have a unique article number.

The following citation:

Carbon Balance Manage 2004, 2:1

refers to article 1 from volume 2 of the journal.

As an online journal, Carbon Balance and Management does not have issue numbers. Each volume corresponds to a calendar year.

To keep up to date with the latest articles from Carbon Balance and Management, why not register to receive alerts? Registration also enables you to customise your subject areas of interest, store your searches, and submit your manuscripts.

Submission of manuscripts

Manuscripts should be submitted electronically to Carbon Balance and Management using the online submission system. Full details of how to submit a manuscript are given in the instructions for authors.

General journal policies

Carbon Balance and Management is published  by BioMed Central, an independent publisher committed to ensuring peer-reviewed biomedical research is Open Access. That means it is freely and universally accessible online, it is archived in at least one internationally recognised free access repository, and its authors retain copyright, allowing anyone to reproduce or disseminate articles, according to the BioMed Central copyright and licence agreement. Carbon Balance and Management however, has taken this further by making all its content Open Access.

Carbon Balance and Management's articles are archived in PubMed Central, the US National Library of Medicine's full-text repository of life science literature, and also in repositories at the University of Potsdam in Germany, at INIST in France and in e-Depot, the National Library of the Netherlands' digital archive of all electronic publications. The journal is also participating in the British Library's e-journals pilot project, and plans to deposit copies of all articles with the British Library.

BioMed Central is working closely with the Thomson Reuters (ISI) to ensure that citation analysis of articles published in Carbon Balance and Management will be available.

Carbon Balance and Management is able to deliver summaries of frequently updated content via Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. These are accessible via the orange "XML" button at the top of the list of recent articles or the list of most accessed articles. For more information about RSS feeds see our publisher's website.

For further information about general policies please see the instructions for authors.