1. What is the vision of All Earth?
All Earth is a reinvention of an existing JCR- and Scopus-listed peer-reviewed fully open access journal, i.e. Geodinamica Acta, and re-launched as a new forward-looking and broad-science journal publishing in all disciplines related to Earth and Space Sciences. Geodinamica Acta had a long history in publishing original research articles, comprehensive reviews and book reviews since 1987. Geodinamica Acta published articles primarily in both internal and external geodynamics and promoted discussions between various disciplines that work on the dynamics of the lithosphere and hydrosphere. The new All Earth is structured with expanded bandwidth coverage into all spherical perspectives of our home planet. This reinvention is to ensure the journal meets the needs of the modern research community and to address the interconnected nature of global research and management challenges.
The dynamic Earth is never in rest. Natural and anthropogenic forces have been imposing constant changes on Earth’s land, air and water systems and biomes, and bringing significant consequences and societal impacts. The complexities of individual and interactive processes of components in atmosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere are among the most amazing challenges that we strive to reveal and understand. On the other hand, ever-improving space-borne and airborne Earth observation capabilities, ever-changing sensing technology and computational capacities, ever-increasing accessible open Earth science data and multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborations, all permit new insights into intertwined all spherical components across spatial, temporal and energy scales, which enable disentangling unknown and uncertainties among the complexities. With unprecedented attentions to the changing environment, All Earth provides an inspirational, inclusive, appealing and encouraging international and interdisciplinary forum to publish high-quality manuscripts from global communities of Earth system sciences. Our goal is for All Earth to become a pre-eminent broad Earth Sciences titles and a key forum for sharing and finding knowledge about the fundamental characteristics and challenges of our home planet.
2. What are the contents of All Earth?
All Earth contains primary sections with disciplinary focuses. The initial set of sections include, Atmosphere, focusing on atmospheric fundamentals and applications and climate science; Biosphere, focusing on terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, biogeochemical cycles, landscape dynamics and land change science; Hydrosphere, focusing on terrestrial water, ocean, and cryosphere; Lithosphere, focusing on geology and solid Earth, geochemistry and geophysics; Planetary Change and Palaeosciences, focusing on the past and current state of the Earth system, future scenarios, and all perspectives of global change; and Earth Observations, focusing on research development based on orbital and airborne observations over the land and ocean, different types of sensing capacities from all spherical perspectives and their applications in revealing complexity of intertwined roles of Earth system components and global change, so as human-nature interactions and societal impacts such as sustainability and climate change mitigation. Modifications and adjustments of sectional design and topical coverages will be exercised whenever needed with establishment of the editorial team and as All Earth is evolving.
3. As the Editor-in-Chief, what is your plan on All Earth?
It is my great honour to serve as the Editor-in-Chief of All Earth. I believe that teamwork is the key for All Earth to be successful. This is in particular true when the journal is to cover dynamic interactions of Earth’s spheres and their constituents with multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary focuses across the Earth and Space Sciences and with societal connections and impacts. The editorial board will include eminent Section Editors and supporting Associate Editors and Editorial Board Members whose combined expertise will cover an incredibly broad range of earth science disciplines and topics, and will continually grow and evolve to support the needs of the research ecosystem. I look forward to working with the editorial team, authors, reviewers, readers, academics and practitioners around the world, upholding the highest publishing ethics, commissioning contents and special issues, and ensuring timely publications. I am absolutely confident that striving together we can advance All Earth into the expected level of high-quality publications with global impacts and reputation.
4. Why open access publication is important to All Earth?
Open access (OA) becomes increasingly popular in journal publications. OA has made scientific publications easily discoverable and widely available to a broad scope of audiences. OA is becoming a routine option that helps promote and bridge multidisciplinary collaboration and research development. OA is transforming traditional scholarly publication with improved transparency and serving the purpose of scientific research and communication of science in societal benefits.
Studies in Earth and Space Sciences are usually characterised as location-based, e.g. terrestrial and extraterrestrial, global, continental, regional, local and site specifics; scale-dependent, e.g. temporal, spatial and energy variations and coverages; and time-specific, e.g. geologic, climatic, contemporary, and cause and effect phenomena and events. Earth and Space Sciences require efforts from scientists around the world in collaborative explorations and expeditions. OA publication offers an effective platform in research development and information and data sharing. I enthusiastically support All Earth as a fully open access journal. I firmly believe that the contributors, scientific and management communities, and ultimately the society and humanity can benefit from the OA policy.
5. What data sharing policy does All Earth support, and why is this important?
Many Taylor & Francis journals, including All Earth, have policies on data sharing (https://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/data-sharing-policies/). The policies state how data associated with published article should be shared. Whether it has been observed, collected or generated, research data is the information needed for independent verification of research results. In other words, research data is the underlying evidence upon which the claims made in publication rely. As science becomes more open, researchers who share data are getting the benefits. Like OA to peer-reviewed publications, open access to research data can be beneficial to research collaborations and increase confidence in research findings. Open data sharing and reuse are becoming very common in Earth and Space Sciences. Many top funding agencies make data sharing a requirement. The rapid development of online infrastructures as open data repositories makes open data policy operable and facilitates data sharing and open research. As quoted from the policies, there are several benefits to sharing data.
Sharing data publicly improves the robustness of the research process, supporting validation, research transparency, reproducibility and replicability of results. This can in turn, advance discovery and knowledge.
Sharing data can lead to reuse and discovery, with greater opportunities for carrying out meta-analyses and the extraction of new knowledge.
Depositing data in a repository that mints a permanent identifier such as a DOI, allows authors and others to cite the data set, allowing researchers to get appropriate credit for their work.
Data deposition supports the preservation of data long term.
Wider public availability of research data supports the translation of research into practice.
Considering the aims and scope of All Earth, the attitudes to data sharing within the Earth Sciences community, and the desire to make the journal inclusive and transparent, we believe the ‘Publicly Available’ policy (https://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/data-sharing-policies/publicly-available/) is the most appropriate way to meet the needs of the research community and ensure the journal provides a home for high-quality and robust science. The policy requires authors to deposit their data in a repository and cite it in the paper, although they are free to choose what licence the data is published under. The open data policy would require authors to include a Data Availability Statement in their manuscript describing where the data set is held, e.g. in which data repository, and how it can be accessed. There are exemptions for any data that cannot be shared for commercial, safety, or privacy reasons.
It has been commonly adopted that data citations should be accorded the same importance in the scholarly record as citations of other research objects, such as publications. Data citation is adopted as good research practice and is part of the scholarly ecosystem supporting data reuse. I support the open data policy and looking forward to working with authors and contributors in promoting data sharing and reuse.
6. What are the benefits of publishing in All Earth?
There are several benefits of publishing in All Earth. As a fully open access journal, accepted manuscripts are made immediately available, free of charge to all, allowing research to address a wide audience, increasing the profile of the author and their institution. All articles published in All Earth are freely and permanently accessible online without subscription paywall or registration fee. Research articles published in a journal listed in major indexed databases would be more discoverable online and with potential impacts. All Earth is a journal indexed in various databases including Current Abstracts, DOAJ, EBSCO, GeoRef, GEOBASE, Science Citation Index Expanded, Scopus, Ovid, ProQuest and GoOA (National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Science). Articles published in All Earth undergo comprehensive peer-review. Taylor & Francis is committed to peer-review integrity and upholding the highest standards of review. We invite and welcome manuscripts of original research, reviews, communications and commentaries from all disciplines of Earth system sciences and from diversified group of authors around the world. We would like the journal to publish all sound science, including studies which report null or negative results, and replication studies, as long as they are robust and high-quality papers.
7. What would be your advice to early career authors to publish in All Earth?
I remember vividly my early career days as graduate student and junior faculty member. While I appreciate gratefully the guidance and support from my academic advisors and mentors along the way, I could not stop thinking about the impacts and inspirations of constructive review comments, insightful questions and suggestions, and encouragements from reviewers and editors on my research and scholarship development. I believe that early career authors, including graduate students, are among the most energic and creative minds and productive forces in academia and research world. They have the curiosity and courage. They are ambitious, willing and capable of taking challenges. Their research creativities always lead to novel ideas, innovative methodologies and approaches. Like all scholars in all ranks, early career authors also face challenges in peer-reviewed publication process. They would need mentoring and guidance to grow before becoming academic giants. My advices to early career authors in peer-reviewed publication would be about the following.
Be open minded and tell a full story. Peer-reviewed publication is your opportunity to convince the editors and reviewers that your research subject is important and relevant; your data and methods are adequately and appropriately collected, handled, processed and analysed; your results are complete, clearly presented, convincing and compelling; and your discussions are on targets and with insights.
Be clear about the novelty of your research. You may need to present something unique, e.g. either providing improved theoretical and empirical thoughts, or new and creative methods, or new type of applications. Towards the application end, you may need to demonstrate the positive influences of your research in management practices, assessment of effectiveness of the research output, influential evidence in shaping public policies and other stakeholder outcomes.
Be sure that your research helps gain improved or new insights and/or contributes to a larger research agenda. You should be able to clearly identify and describe the highlights of your study.
Conduct research based on a substantial amount of literature review. In most of the cases, you may contribute an improved understanding of a subject of study only when you have a solid command of published literatures. Open access publications help facilitate such requests and efforts.
Have confidence and communicate your thoughts with editors and reviewers through the review/revision process. Most of editors and reviewers are critique listeners and value innovative and high-quality research. Editors and reviewers work hard to ensure that the research ideas and opinions are clearly and precisely presented. They usually provide constructive comments and suggestions with insightful questions. Their contributions should be much recognised and appreciated for improvement of the quality of individual manuscripts, so as the credential of the journal.
I have immense respects to early career researchers. I encourage and welcome early career authors to contribute manuscripts to All Earth. I do hope that early career authors can take All Earth as a preferred forum in their publications.
8. What editing services can help authors prepare publications in All Earth?
Taylor & Francis Author Services provide detailed information and guidance in supporting manuscript development, including a full range of pre-submission manuscript preparation to help maximise the impact of authors’ research and improve the quality of the manuscript. The services include English language editing, translation with editing, manuscript formatting, originality check, and technical review. The following websites would be helpful finding the information.
About author service: https://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/?utm_source=CPB&utm_medium=cms&utm_campaign=JPA12830
About editing service: https://www.tandfeditingservices.com/?utm_source=Author_Services&utm_medium=cms&utm_campaign=JMT05842&utm_source=CPB&utm_medium=cms&utm_campaign=JPA12830
About English language editing service: https://www.tandfeditingservices.com/services/
9. Concluding remark
With all challenges ahead, our ambition is to support the uptake of the latest original research across interconnected all spheres of our home planet into evidence-based policy advice and decision-making so that we can collectively contribute to the global policy priorities represented by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). I hope All Earth can provide such a forum for all.