Submission and Review Process
Journal of Tropical Ecology uses ScholarOne Manuscripts for online submission and peer review.
There are no charges for submission.
JTE uses a single blind review process. All papers are independently peer reviewed by a minimum of two external peer reviewers and a member of the Editorial Board. Depending on the quality, editorial fit and generality of the study, some manuscripts may be declined prior to formal review.
Please note that the journal uses software to screen papers where there is reason to believe that material may not be original. By submitting your paper you are agreeing to any necessary originality checks your paper may have to undergo during the peer review and production processes.
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.
Information for peer reviewers
For resources about peer review, including guides on how to peer review journal articles and book proposals, in addition to information on ethics in peer review, OPRS blinding, and Publons, please visit our ‘Information for Peer Reviewers’ page.
Article Proofs
The corresponding author will receive a link to access their article proofs on the online proofing tool. It is the responsibility of the author to ensure that no errors are present. Authors should make and submit corrections on the proofing tool, answering all author queries. Corrections should be submitted within three working days of receipt. Only essential corrections should be made. Authors are unable to make excessive alterations at the proof stage.
Author Access Code
The corresponding author(s) of an accepted paper will receive a free code to access their article online as well as a free code to share the article with peers.
Open Access
Authors in JTE have the option to publish their paper under a fully Open Access agreement, upon payment of an Article Processing Charge. In this case, the final published Version of Record will be made freely available to all in perpetuity under a creative commons license, enabling its re-use and re-distribution. This Open Access option is only offered to authors upon acceptance of an article for publication.
Authors choosing the Open Access option must sign the Open Access License to Publish and send this to Journals Copyright at journalscopyright@cambridge.org or the relevant Production Editor for the journal. Once approved, you will be contacted by our third party supplier, RightsLink, who will handle the payment process.
More information about Open Access in JTE, including the current Article Processing Charge, can be found on our website.
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.
Copyright
The policy of JTE is that authors (or in some cases their employers) retain copyright and grant Cambridge University Press a licence to publish their work. In the case of gold open access articles this is a non-exclusive licence. Authors must complete and return an author publishing agreement form as soon as their article has been accepted for publication; the journal is unable to publish without this. Please download the appropriate publishing agreement here, sign, and return via email to Journals Copyright at journalscopyright@cambridge.org.
For open access articles, the form also sets out the Creative Commons licence under which the article is made available to end users: a fundamental principle of open access is that content should not simply be accessible but should also be freely re-usable. Articles will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY) by default. This means that the article is freely available to read, copy and redistribute, and can also be adapted (users can “remix, transform, and build upon” the work) for any commercial or non-commercial purpose, as long as proper attribution is given. Authors can, in the publishing agreement form, choose a different kind of Creative Commons license (including those prohibiting non-commercial and derivative use) if they prefer.
Digital preservation policy
Cambridge University Press publications are deposited in the following digital archives to guarantee long-term digital preservation:
- CLOCKSS (journals)
- Portico (journals and books).
Data availability
JTE recommends all data, as well as scripts and other tools used for the analysis, be made accessible in a public repository (such as the Dryad Digital Repository, FigShare, or GitHub) to the extent possible.