Changes in AMBIO policies

Systematic reviews to identify, appraise, and synthesize high-quality evidence have for a long time been crucial to evidence-based medicine. Evidence-based approaches to support decision- and policy-makers are growing in importance also in environmental research. To summarize and identify significant patterns that otherwise may go undetected in a large number of individual studies, systematic reviews often use meta-analyses. Such quantitative analyses require three simple measures to be reported: mean effect size, sample size, and some measure of variability. Surprisingly, few original research articles report these data, precluding their inclusion in meta-analyses (Haddaway 2014). AMBIO’s revised instructions for authors will explicitly request researchers to provide such information when applicable.

Editors and reviewers should be focusing on the quality of science and not the format. To make the submission process faster, we invite you to submit your manuscript as a single PDF file including all key sections in the different article categories, but without any particular format requirements. Only when your manuscript is at the revision stage, you will be requested to format according to AMBIO’s style. This way you will not have to spend valuable research time formatting (or re-formatting) your manuscript prior to first submission to AMBIO.

The volume of Electronic Supplementary Material (ESM) to AMBIO articles has grown tremendously during the last 2 years. The ESM offers authors the opportunity to publish material that forms the basis for an article. The ESM is therefore directly relevant to the article, however, the paper must be able to stand alone without it. Examples of typical supplementary materials include questionnaires, specifications of methodology, background data sets, multimedia files, additional illustrations, etc. ESM should not include any preliminary data or analyses. AMBIO editors and reviewers currently peer review ESM, but given that most highly qualified researchers are overburdened with review requests and that the printed article should be able to stand alone, we have decided to remove ESM from the peer review process. ESM will be made available to editors and reviewers, but with no request to review it. The cover page of ESM will in the future clearly state this fact. Thus, we have decided to focus editor and reviewer efforts on maintaining the high-quality peer review of papers.

The open call for research groups to submit thematic proposals for future special issues continues to be a great success. Articles published in special issues belong to the most highly cited papers in AMBIO, which has been the case for several years. We will make articles in special issues even more visible to the scientific community by introducing a new policy to make open access mandatory. Please submit your proposal for a special issue to appear in AMBIO in 2016 before October 1, 2014 when AMBIO editors will convene and assess all new proposals simultaneously. If you are interested in submitting a proposal, detailed guidelines on how to proceed are found in instructions for authors. During 2015, you can read thematic articles dealing with (a) climate change effects on natural resources, ecosystem services, biodiversity, and governance, (b) the impact of digital technology on nature conservation, (c) future agriculture with minimized phosphorus losses to waters, (d) Baltic Sea ecosystem-based management.

Since the inception of the new article category in December 2012, we have accepted 25 Perspective articles after peer review. A great success! A Perspective provides a forum for authors to discuss topical environmental issues, ideas, or models and intends to evoke new ideas and stimulate debate. We have slightly revised the description of the Perspective article category in instructions for authors to emphasize that (a) it must relate to published research and relevant theoretical/analytical frameworks, (b) if analyses have been undertaken the methodology should be described briefly, (c) the language needs to be objective and balanced.