Environmental Psychology Open (EPO) is a Diamond Open Access journal, that is, publications involve no fees for either authors or readers.

Submissions to the journal must adhere to the guidelines specified below and be formatted according to the EPO manuscript template (see below).

Submit New Manuscript or View Submitted Manuscripts.

Article Types

EPO publishes different types of scientific articles. In addition to research reports (empirical reports, review papers, and theoretical contributions to environmental psychology), we are glad to receive practice reports and case studies that describe activities or projects of practitioners in the field of environmental psychology. We also explicitly welcome the submission of informative null results and replication studies. Empirical contributions can also be submitted as Registered Report. This involves the peer review of the introduction/rationale and methods prior to data collection, which can lead to in-principle acceptance of the complete manuscript that authors submit after data collection (see osf.io for a detailed description of this article format). In addition, authors can submit commentaries that discuss current publications or developments in environmental psychology. Suggestions for other types of articles (e.g., essays, interviews) or formats are appreciated as well and should be discussed with the editorial team prior to submission.

Research reports, practice reports and case studies can be submitted either as regular article (maximum 7000 words, 5 figures/tables) or as short report (maximum 2500 words, 2 figures/tables). Registered reports will usually have the length of a regular article. Commentaries are limited to a maximum of 1500 words. Word limit restrictions include footnotes, but not the abstract, impact and open-science statements, reference list, tables, figures, and figure captions. Additional figures/tables are allowed if the text is shortened accordingly, or can be submitted as supplementary materials (which will then be available for download on the article page).

Manuscript Template

Manuscripts can be submitted in English or German and need to adhere to a standard set of criteria in terms of format and content. To ensure adherence to these criteria, we created a manuscript template. This template is already configured in accordance with formal publication criteria. In addition, it contains all relevant guidelines for the structure and content of your manuscript. We ask authors to follow these guidelines and recommend working from the template (Microsoft Word, Open Office). Manuscripts that do not adhere to these criteria can be desk-rejected.

Manuscript template (English)  |  Manuskriptvorlage (German)

Required Statements

As specified in the manuscript template, all submissions are to be accompanied by three statements, which will be published along with the article if the article is accepted.

• An impact statement. To facilitate the exchange between science and practice, we ask you to highlight the implications of your work for the application of environmental psychology, practitioners, and the general public. Please use plain language and be as specific as possible and also refer to potential limitations of applicability.
• An open-science statement. To ensure the transparency and collective utility of published articles, we ask you to specify where (i.e., under which permanently available link) you have published the data and materials (e.g., questionnaires, stimulus materials, interview guides, coding systems, analysis scripts) on which your article is based. We recommend using an online repository for this (e.g., the PsychArchives, Open Science Framework). As a rule, data and materials should be made openly available. If some data or materials cannot be shared, the authors should use this statement to justify why. Please also specify whether your study was preregistered and conducted in line with the pre-registration. Pre-registration (e.g., at As Predicted, PreReg in Psychology or the Open Science Framework) is not mandatory, but explicitly recommended. We also ask you to explicitly confirm that you reported all measures, conditions, data exclusions, and how you determined our sample size. These open-science recommendations and practices will not be equally relevant for every type of article. If you think that some recommendations or practices do not pertain to your submission, please use this statement to specify and justify this. Where applicable, EPO awards Open Science Badges for Open Data, Open Materials, and Pre-Registration.
• An author statement. Please specify here for all authors what they contributed to the present research and the writing of the manuscript. Please also disclose all funding sources and relationships and functions of the authors that could be interpreted as a conflict of interest.

Review Process

All submissions will first be checked by a member of the editorial team before potentially being sent to external reviewers. Reviewed manuscripts will either be accepted for publication, rejected, or returned to the authors for revisions. As a rule, published submissions will have been reviewed by at least two reviewers.

We make use of an open peer review procedure. That is, articles that have been accepted for publication will be published together with all reviewer comments and the authors’ responses to those comments made during the review process. By default, reviews are published anonymously, but reviewers have the option to sign their reviews. The reviewer guidelines correspond to the instructions to authors which are outlined in the manuscript template (see above).