Call for submissions, "COVID-19 and interactions with our environment"

Help us to shape the future - during and after the current COVID-19 pandemic

During the last months, the Coronavirus pandemic has changed the lives of many and had a more or less direct effect on virtually everyone on the planet. This rapid change is already showing visible effects in the environmental domain – huge changes are happening in different environmental dimensions and at different scales.  This special series, “COVID-19 interactions with our environment” aims to address some of these issues, and shape the debate about the effects on the environment and our subsequent recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The scope of the special series, part of UCL Open: Environment, is outlined in full here. There is also an editorial giving context for the call, from EAB member Dr Francesco Aletta, Faculty of the Built Environment, UCL; and Professor Dan Osborn, Faculty of Earth Sciences, UCL, and Editor-in-Chief, UCL Open: Environment. Papers can be:

• Research articles directly concerned with environmental issues (such as those linked to air quality or environmental noise or biodiversity – including its consumption or human ecology).
• Articles that address strategic, policy or operational matters at the interface of disease and the environment, as well as social implications of the pandemic and the environmental changes connected to it.

Papers should be strongly interdisciplinary - either in terms of the author’s skill sets or subject matter. Discussion and research papers are equally welcome.

We invite you to browse articles already submitted for the special series and open for review:

• An Engineering Model of the COVID-19 Trajectory to Predict Success of Isolation Initiatives
• The environmental dangers of employing single-use face masks as part of a COVID-19 exit strategy

UCL Open: Environment is an open scholarship, interdisciplinary journal. It operates dually as an open access e-journal, and offers immediate publication in a dedicated preprint server, where peer review is rigorous, open and transparent to all. Submission is open to anyone, and we welcome submissions from non-UCL researchers and academics; APCs are waived for UCL researchers, and very competitive for everyone. All published articles (after peer review and editorial acceptance) in this series will be additionally indexed in PubMed Central as part of the Public Health Emergency COVID-19 Initiative.

Submission is open to anyone. For more information or to enquire about submission, please contact the Editors at uclopen.environment@ucl.ac.uk