General Terms

While Copernicus Publications and the EGU welcome any original scientific work for publication, we expect that:

• the work submitted for publication has not been published before, except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture or thesis, that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, that its publication has been approved by all author(s) and, tacitly or explicitly, by the responsible authorities and/or the institutes where the work has been carried out, that, if and when the manuscript is accepted for publication, the manuscript will not be submitted to any other journal in any other language;
• the author(s) have secured the right to reproduce any material in his/her/their work that has already been published elsewhere;
• the author(s) and the copyright holder(s), if different from the author(s), agree with the Licence and Copyright Agreement. This states that if the paper is accepted for publication then it is published under the Creative Commons Attribution, NonCommerical and ShareAlike Licence . It also grants Copernicus Publications and the EGU certain rights that it requires to publish paper and CD copies of eEarth;
• the author(s) agree(s) and has (have) obeyed the General Obligations for Authors;
• with regard to the evaluation of manuscripts, the editors and the referees will follow their guidelines as summarized in the General Obligations for Editors and the General Obligations for Referees.

General Guidelines for Manuscripts & Submission

• In general, contributions should be short but self-contained, concentrating on new results or techniques. The length of an article is not limited with regard to its number of pages. Journal-specific differences in the limitation will be specified in the corresponding aims & scope on the corresponding web site.
• Papers should be clear, concise, and written in English. They must conform to the organization and style of the journal with correct spelling and good sentence structure. Correct English is the responsibility of the author(s), although the editor(s) and the referees are kindly asked to help in language editing of the manuscript if necessary. On request by the editor, articles will also be copy-edited.
• Before submission manuscripts need to be registered. This process requires author details and also a set of keywords, describing the manuscript. In return the author(s) receive a manuscript number and information on how to upload the files containing the text, figures and additional material.
• Manuscripts (i.e. work prior to the review process) as well as articles (i.e. work having passed the review process) for publication in regular or special issues must be submitted in digital format, zipped or not zipped, by using the appropriate upload forms (preferred option), by email or ftp or on diskette or CD-ROM to the Editorial Support Office or to the Publication Production Office, respectively. In case of "extended abstracts" or "proceedings" or "special publications" the authors have to submit their manuscripts for peer-review to selected Editors (Guest-Editors). It is the responsibility of the organizers of such publications to inform the Editorial Support Office about the list of Guest-Editors and their association to the manuscripts expected for publication and the authors about the technical details of the submission in consultation with these Editors (Guest-Editors). The Editors (Guest-Editors) will be responsible to select at least two independent referees per manuscript and to use the "Check-List for Reviewers" and the "Editor's Report Form" for the peer-review process and to inform the author about the outcome of this process respectively (External Evaluation). Only the final articles, however, must be submitted to the Publication Production Office.
• Supplementary material, such as data sets, animated visualisation, etc., should be submitted together with the manuscript for peer-reviewed publication.
• Author(s) are obliged to suggest 4-5 potential referees. Ideally, suggested reviewers should be scientists who are not closely associated (i.e. at different institutes and who have not collaborated significantly in the past research) with any of the authors. Should this not be the case, please indicate this. In any case, all suggested reviewers should be able to offer fair and impartial reviews of the material being submitted.