Journal Guide

Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences (NHESS) is an international and interdisciplinary journal for the publication of original research concerning natural hazards. New perspectives for the understanding and tackling of natural hazards will arise by considering the subject form a broad base where the separate geosciences merge. NHESS serves the community of geoscientists concerned with natural hazards and also those interacted in publishing communications regarding interdisciplinary problems arising from difficulties encountered in the tackling of the mitigation of risks associated with natural hazards.

Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics (NPG) is an international, interdisciplinary journal for the publication of original research furthering knowledge on nonlinear processes in all branches of Earth, planetary and solar system sciences. The editors encourage submissions that apply nonlinear analysis methods to both models and data.The journal maintains sections for research articles, review articles, brief communications, comments and replies, and book reviews, as well as "Special Issues".

Ocean Science aims to be one of the leaders in the modern generation of "Open Access" or free-to web journals. Much of the literature about such journals is available on the web and links to many of the main sources are given below. One of the aims of open access publishing is to make scientific developments available to people, rich or poor, all over the world as cheaply as possible. This aim underlies many of the initiatives and statements, such as those of Budapest, Berlin and Bethesda.A second, related, aim is to use computer developments and the web to push down the cost of scientific publication. This is a topic discussed in publications from the Wellcome Trust and the House of Commons Committee in the UK. In each case they are concerned by the power of existing publishers to control the market and the reluctance of scientists to move to Open Access Publishing.One concern of the scientists is that the new journals might have a lower scientific standard than traditional ones and that their important "citation index" is low. However Nature (2001) reported that on-line journals were soon obtaining high citation scores and that is the experience of the EGU. Open Access also allows us to introduce new systems of submission and reviewing. There are concerns about the effectiveness of the present review system - the reviewers lack of experience in some key area maybe allowing publication of papers with significant errors. There have also been concerns that referees have sat on papers so that publication is delayed and authors have lost priority of publication.To tackle these problems, Ocean Science is using the two-stage publication scheme developed by Copernicus Publications and the European Geosciences Union. After a brief review by the Topic Editor to check that they are suitable, submitted articles are published in Ocean Science Discussions. This publication can be cited in questions of priority.The paper is then formally reviewed in the traditional way by at least two reviewers. The reviews are published and other scientists and the authors can make and publish their own comments to help the review process. Finally all of these comments are used to decide whether the paper needs revision or whether it can be published directly in the full review journal Ocean Science.No doubt the "Open Access" model will develop further in the future. We plan to be closely involved in such developments. At the same time we want to use the new technology to encompass both integrated views and detailed studies within the same high quality ocean science journal.

The Polarforschung journal aims to publish scientific results from all polar-related disciplines. The journal was first published in 1931 by the Deutschen Gesellschaft für Polarforschung.The complete listing of all "Polarforschung" articles together with links to PDFs and to primary data is available from AWI's insitutional repositories ePIC (articles listed according to publication year) and PANGAEA respectively. .

The Cryosphere (TC) is an international scientific journal dedicated to the publication and discussion of research articles, short communications and review papers on all aspects of frozen water and ground on Earth and on other planetary bodies.The main subject areas are:* ice sheets and glaciers;* planetary ice bodies;* permafrost, river and lake ice;* seasonal snowcover;* sea ice;* remote sensing, numerical modelling, in-situ and laboratory studies of the above and including studies of the interaction of the cryosphere with the rest of the climate system.The Cryosphere has an innovative two-stage publication process which involves a scientific discussion forum and exploits the full potential of the Internet to:* foster scientific discussion;* enhance the effectiveness and transparency of scientific quality assurance;* enable rapid publication;* make scientific publications freely accessible.In the first stage, papers that pass a rapid access-review by one of the editors are immediately published on the The Cryosphere Discussions (TCD) website. They are then subject to Interactive Public Discussion, during which the referee’s comments (anonymous or attributed), additional short comments by other members of the scientific community (attributed) and the author’s replies are also published in TCD. In the second stage, the peer-review process is completed and, if accepted, the final revised papers are published in TC. To ensure publication precedence for authors, and to provide a lasting record of scientific discussion, TCD and TC are both ISSN-registered, permanently archived and fully citable.

Weather and Climate Dynamics (WCD) is a not-for-profit international scientific journal dedicated to the publication and public discussion of high-quality research on dynamical processes in the atmosphere. It represents a timely effort to establish a seamless perspective on atmospheric flows, on scales from weather to climate (minutes to decades). The scope of the journal includes the following: the dynamics of extreme weather events (case studies and climatological analyses); weather system dynamics in tropical, midlatitude and polar regions; interactions of atmospheric flows with cloud physics and/or radiation; links between the atmospheric water cycle and weather systems; tropical-extratropical and midlatitude-polar interactions; atmospheric teleconnections and stratosphere-troposphere coupling; boundary-layer dynamics and coupling to land, ocean and ice; atmospheric variability and predictability on time scales from minutes to decades; storm track and Hadley cell dynamics; role of atmospheric dynamics in paleoclimate and climate change projections; and other aspects of weather and climate dynamics. Theoretical studies, idealized numerical studies, full-physics numerical studies, and diagnostic studies using (re)analysis and/or observational data are welcome.

Web Ecology (WE) is an Open Access Journal issued by the European Ecological Federation (EEF) representing the Ecological Societies within Europe and associated members. Web Ecology publishes papers from all fields of ecology within a broad European context. It is a forum to communicate results of experimental, theoretical as well as descriptive studies of general interest to an international audience. Original contributions as well as short communications or reviews on ecological research on all kinds of organisms and ecosystems are welcome as well as papers that express emerging ideas and concepts with a sound scientific background. Papers must be original and not previously published in another journal. Nevertheless, a re-analysis or a re-interpretation of published data is possible. We also encourage to publish research already reported within master or PhD theses or research published in the so-called #!#!grey literature#!#!. However, we do not reprint such theses or reports. They always require considerable shortening and editing before to meet the standards of international publications in ecology.