About the Journal

About the Journal

Mission

Consilience: The Journal of Sustainable Development is an online journal dedicated to promoting dialogue on sustainable development by bringing students, researchers, professors, and practitioners from a variety of disciplines and geographical regions in direct conversation with each other through an online, academically rigorous medium. As a multidisciplinary academic journal, our name is inspired by American biologist E.O. Wilson's eponymous text, which proposes ways in which to unite the sciences with the humanities. 

Focus and Scope 

Consilience publishes a range of academic material including scholarly articles, opinion pieces, field notes, and photo essays. By providing a public platform for discussion, we hope to encourage a global community to think more broadly, thoroughly, and analytically about sustainable development.  The journal is run by a team of undergraduate and graduate students, under the guidance of faculty from Columbia University in the City of New York. Consilience draws submissions from across five continents. We have published or are currently editing submissions from:

  • Europe – Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, United Kingdom
  • Asia – China, India, Malaysia, Palestine, Philippines
  • Africa – Burkina Faso, Kenya, Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda
  • Oceania – Australia, New Zealand
  • Latin America – Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela
  • United States of America

Typically, more than 50% of our submissions are from outside the USA.

Open Access Policy 

Consilience provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. Authors retain their copyright and, as of 2015, agree to license their articles with a Creative Commons “Attribution” license. Articles published prior to 2015 are licensed with a Creative Commons “Attribution, Non-Commercial, No-Derivatives” license. You can read more about Creative Commons licenses at creativecommons.org. 

Consilience is a no-fee journal. Authors are not charged for the publication of their articles.

Peer Review Process

As of the Spring 2021 issue, Consilience will introduce a double-blind peer review round to the review process. In order to assess that the submission aligns with the aim and scope of the journal, submissions will go through a preliminary screening process. Successful submissions will go through a double-blind peer review by appointed experts in the field chosen from our diverse pool of peer reviewers. Once the submission is accepted, an editor from our editorial team will be assigned as the primary point of contact for the author and will perform stylistic and small-scale edits on the submission. The editor-in-chief will approve each submission for publication, followed by a final review of the entire issue by the Advisory Board prior to publication.

Consilience is seeking graduate/doctoral students and scholars willing to serve as peer reviewers for the upcoming 2024 issue, if you are interested follow the instructions in our Call for Peer Reviewers.

Code of Ethics

Prospective author(s) represent that their submission is an original manuscript and is an unpublished work that is not under consideration elsewhere. Plagiarism in whole or in part, including duplicate publication of the author's own work, will not be tolerated. Plagiarism includes, but is not limited to: 

  • The reuse of exact wording or phrases from another published work
  • The improper use of quotation marks 
  • A failure to attribute quoted texts and ideas to their original authors 
  • Using tables, data visualizations, illustrations, and other elements without proper attribution
  • Reusing one’s own previously published words or ideas without attribution

Issues of plagiarism will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis by the editorial board. In the event that the editors are notified of suspected plagiarism in a submitted manuscript or published article, the editors will follow guidelines suggested by the Committee on Publication Ethics.

Archiving Policy

Since 2017, Consilience has been archived in Columbia University’s Academic Commons. Academic Commons is Columbia University’s institutional repository, offering long-term public access to research shared by the Columbia community. A program of the Columbia University Libraries, Academic Commons provides secure, replicated storage for files in multiple formats. Academic Commons assigns a DOI and accurate metadata to each work to enhance discoverability.