Submission of manuscripts
Contributions for consideration for publication, accompanied by a covering letter or email, should be submitted online to ScholarOne here:
http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/submit_ija
Further information on ScholarOne can be found here, and queries can be directed to the Editorial Office.
Submission of a paper to International Journal of Astrobiology implies that it represents an original contribution not previously published and that it is not currently being considered elsewhere; that the publication has been approved by all the authors and relevant authorities or institutions; and that the authors have been granted a permission to reproduce any copyright material. Authors of articles published in the journal sign a license to publish with Cambridge University Press (with certain rights reserved) and you will receive a form for signature on acceptance of your paper.
Authors are invited to suggest up to three referees for their paper. However, the Editors reserve the right to select referees other than, or in addition to, those suggested.
Keywords
Authors should not enter keywords on the manuscript, there will be a free text box provided during the online submission process for you to add the keywords and they will then be added during the production process. Authors will be asked to provide at least three keywords for their submission.
Supplementary Material
Relevant material which is not suitable for inclusion in the main article body, such as movies or numerical simulations/animations, can be uploaded as part of the initial submission. Each individual file must be accompanied by a separate caption and a suitable title (which can be provided in a Word file), such as ‘Movie 1’, and large files should be archived as a .zip or .tar file before uploading. Each individual supplementary file should be no more than 10MB. Upon publication these materials will then be hosted online alongside the final published article. Likewise, should there be detailed mathematical relations, tables or figures which are likely to be useful only to a few specialists, these can also be published online as supplementary material. Note that supplementary material is published ‘as is’, with no further production performed. For further support, please see our supplementary material preparation instructions.
Where relevant we encourage authors to publish additional qualitative or quantitative research outputs in an appropriate repository, and cite these in manuscripts.
ORCID
We require all corresponding authors to identify themselves using ORCID when submitting a manuscript to this journal. ORCID provides a unique identifier for researchers and, through integration with key research workflows such as manuscript submission 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 have authored.
- Convenience: As more organisations use ORCID, providing your iD or using it to register for services will automatically link activities to your ORCID record, and will enable you to share this information with other systems and platforms you use, saving you re-keying information multiple times.
- Keeping track: Your ORCID record is a neat place to store and (if you choose) share validated information about your research activities and affiliations.
See our ORCID FAQs for more information.
If you don’t already have an iD, you will need to create one if you decide to submit a manuscript to this journal. You can register for one directly from your user account on ScholarOne, or alternatively via https://ORCID.org/register.
If you already have an iD, please use this when submitting your manuscript, either by linking it to your ScholarOne account, or by supplying it during submission using the "Associate your existing ORCID iD" button.
ORCIDs can also be used if authors wish to communicate to readers up-to-date information about how they wish to be addressed or referred to (for example, they wish to include pronouns, additional titles, honorifics, name variations, etc.) alongside their published articles. We encourage authors to make use of the ORCID profile’s “Published Name” field for this purpose. This is entirely optional for authors who wish to communicate such information in connection with their article. Please note that this method is not currently recommended for author name changes: see Cambridge’s author name change policy if you want to change your name on an already published article. See our ORCID FAQs for more information.
Licence to publish
Before Cambridge can publish your manuscript, we need a signed licence to publish agreement. Under the agreement, certain rights are granted to the journal owner which allow publication of the article. The original ownership of the copyright in the article remains unchanged. For full details see the publishing agreement page.
Review process
This journal uses a single-blind peer review model. This means that the identity of the authors is known to the peer reviewers, but the identity of the peer reviewers is not known to the authors. For further details please refer to the Peer Review Information Pages