About The Lancet Planetary Health

The Lancet Planetary Health, is a gold open access journal that seeks to be the pre-eminent journal for enquiry into sustainable human civilisations in the Anthropocene. As such, we publish peer reviewed research and reviews as well as comment, correspondence, and reportage broadly encompassing sustainable development (the SDG’s) and global environmental change. We particularly favour work that contributes to our understanding of, and transition into, a safe and just space for humanity, respecting planetary boundaries and the social and economic foundations of a healthy life. We are interested in all important aspects of societal development and its interaction with the environment including the drivers of change, the implications of those changes for people and society, and practical policies and interventions for a healthier planetary future.

In keeping with other journals in the Lancet family, The Lancet Planetary Health offers publication online within 8-12 weeks from submission.

Reach & impact

The Lancet journals are both a destination for publication and a platform to advance the global impact of research. The Lancet team cares that your work is highly visible to a global network of researchers, clinicians, industry professionals, policy makers, media outlets, patients, and the wider public, and we work with you and your affiliated institutions to maximise the impact of your research on the world.

Lancet journals have extensive global reach with more than 84 million annual visits on TheLancet.com and 141 million downloaded articles across TheLancet.com and ScienceDirect.
Lancet Alerts, including our electronic Table of Contents, have over 2.1 million subscriptions.
Lancet journals have more than 1.9 million followers on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, WeChat, and Weibo.
With over 487 thousand annual mentions in news articles, research published in Lancet journals receives regular coverage in influential media such as the Associated Press, BBC, CNN, Financial Times, The Guardian, The New York Times, NPR, and The Washington Post.
Lancet podcasts receive nearly 40,000 listens each month.

The Lancet Planetary Health is an internationally trusted source of clinical, public health, and global health knowledge. The Lancet Planetary Health has its first Impact Factor of 19·173, ranking fourth among 274 environmental sciences journals and sixth among 203 public, environmental, and occupational health journals globally (2020 Journal Citation Reports^®, Clarivate 2021).

We recognise that the Journal Impact Factor is just one measure of a journal's performance and encourage authors to explore additional journal impact metrics, which provide a means to assess our journals. The Lancet Planetary Health is also indexed by the following abstracting and indexing services:

CAB Direct
CrossRef
Current Contents - Agriculture, Biology & Environmental Sciences
Current Contents - Clinical Medicine
Current Contents - Social & Behavioral Sciences
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
Embase
Essential Science Indicators
GoOA (National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Science)
MEDLINE
PubMed
Science Citation Index Expanded
Scopus
Social Sciences Citation Index

Information for Authors

Wherever possible, figures and good quality photographs (colour or black and white) should be used to supplement and to enhance the text. We also welcome videos. Further details on the different sections of The Lancet Planetary Health, and how to submit to the journal, are provided below. If you require further clarification, the journal’s editorial staff will be pleased to help (email [email protected]).

Manuscripts must be solely the work of the author(s) stated, must not have been previously published elsewhere, and must not be under consideration by another journal. The Lancet journals are signatories of the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, issued by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE Recommendations) and to the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) code of conduct for editors. We follow COPE's guidelines.

Article processing charges

No subscription or pay-per-view charges apply to any content published in The Lancet Planetary Health. In order to cover the costs of reviewing, copy editing, layout, and online hosting and archiving, the journal charges an article processing fee of $5000 upon acceptance of submitted research articles, reviews and personal view articles (no fee applies to Comment or Correspondence).

If all authors are from group A countries of the Health Inter Network Access to Research Initiative (HINARI), they will automatically be presented with a full fee waiver. If all authors are from a HINARI group B country, or authors are from a mix of group A and B countries, they will automatically be presented with a 50% fee waiver. We will always make it possible to publish an accepted Article regardless of ability to pay. If an author group is unable to pay the full fee the corresponding author should contact the Editor in Chief to discuss discount or waiver options.

The editorial decision to accept is taken well before any request is made as to the ability to pay. Payments are processed by a department unconnected to The Lancet Planetary Health's editorial department.

Copyright and reuse

All content is published under Creative Commons licensing, which enables authors to retain copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make some uses of their work, provided full credit is given to them as originators. Authors will be offered a choice of two licences (CC BY or CC BY-NC-ND) depending on whether or not they wish to allow commercial reuse of their work and whether or not they wish to allow others to alter their work in the course of its reuse. Authors will be asked to sign an exclusive licence (or non-exclusive licence for government employees) to permit our publisher, Elsevier, to publish the work in The Lancet Planetary Health.

Publishing excellence

As trusted sources of information, the Lancet journals set extremely high standards for publishing, and we are committed to ensuring that our editorial processes meet our standards of excellence. From acceptance of your paper through to publication and beyond, our in-house teams of professional Editors, Assistant Editor, Illustrators, Production Editors, and Marketing and Communications experts can provide personal attention and guidance to strengthen the accuracy, accessibility, timeliness, and impact of your research.

Alastair Brown, Editor-In-Chief

I Joined The Lancet Planetary Health in May, 2019 after working at Nature Climate Change since it launched in 2010, where I oversaw the climate change impacts, vulnerability, and adaptation section of the journal. Before that I worked in a policy-facing role at the UK Climate Impacts Programme engaging with willing branches of government and the private sector on ways to adapt to unavoidable climate changes. I studied Environmental Science followed by a Masters in Global Environmental Change, both at the University of Plymouth, UK. My doctoral and postdoctoral research at the University of Southampton, UK, was in the field of palaeoclimatology. I have broad interests in the intersections of people and planet and the pressing challenges these pose.

Sam Hinsley, Senior Editor

I joined The Lancet Planetary Health in 2018, after spending 4 years on The Lancet’s Assistant Editor team. During my time as an Assistant Editor, I became increasingly interested in the ways in which sustainability and equity can be viewed through a health lens, eventually culminating in my move to The Lancet Planetary Health. I have a BSc in Biochemistry from the University of Bath.

Ombudsman

Our ombudsman can: investigate delays in handling submitted manuscripts; discourtesy; failure to follow outlined procedures; failure to take reasonable account of representations to us by authors and readers; and challenges to the publishing ethics of the journal. If you have concerns about any of the above, please first contact an editor or the editorial inbox [email protected]; an editor will then respond to you (often, an editor can respond satisfactorily). If you remain dissatisfied with our response, please contact Malcolm Molyneux ([email protected])

Read more about the ombudsman and see our ombudsman's reports.

March 2022

Volume 6, Issue 3