Instructions for authors

1. General

1.1 Conditions of acceptance

Submission of a manuscript implies that the work has not been published and is not submitted for publication anywhere else. Publication must be approved by all authors. Authors should accept publication fees. For ethics in publishing consult COPE https://publicationethics.org/.

Authors are invited to comply with the “Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly work in Medical Journals”, which were established and made available by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) at: https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/.

1.2 Authorship

The ICMJE recommends that all those designated as authors meet all of the described criteria. The list of criteria is available at https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/. Those contributors who do not meet all of the criteria shall be acknowledged.

For further information see the Ethical standards of Sustainable Buildings.

1.3 Conflicts of interest

Authors must disclose whether or not they have a financial relationship with the organization that sponsored the research. They should also state that they have full control of all primary data and that they agree to allow the journal to review their data if requested.

Therefore the manuscript must be accompanied by the Disclosure Statement at the initial submission (for more information please see Conflicts of Interest in section 3.3 here below).

Any additional conflict of interest, on personal or any other level mustalso be disclosed. For further information see the Ethical standards of Sustainable Buildings.

1.4 The Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-Assisted Technology

Concerning the use of AI in writing the research content, EDP Sciences adheres to the position of COPE.

• AI tools cannot be listed as author of a paper.
• AI tools cannot meet the requirements for authorship and cannot take responsibility for the submitted work, assert conflicts of interest, or manage copyright and license agreements.
• Authors must be transparent in disclosing how AI tools were used in their paper, and are fully responsible for the content of their manuscript, even parts produced by an AI tool, and are thus liable for any breach of publication ethics. Authors who use such technology should describe, in both the cover letter and the submitted work (in the ‘Materials and Methods’ or ‘Acknowledgements’), how the AI tool was used and which tool was used.

1.5 Open Access

The copyright of the article is retained by the author(s) under the Creative Commons license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction provided the original work is properly cited. Authors grant EDP Sciences a license to publish the article and identify EDP Sciences as the original publisher.

1.6 Publication fees

• There is no submission charge in Sustainable Buildings.
• The journal is in Open Access and there are publication charges. Please find the Article Processing Charges (applied only after peer-review, if and when the manuscript is accepted) at https://www.edpsciences.org/en/publication-charges#sbuild
• Waivers and Discounts concerning the Open Access:
  • EDP Sciences provides a waiver to authors based in countries included in Group A of the Research4Life programme.
  • EDP Sciences has signed an APC agreement with the NSLC (National Science Library CAS) the research library service system for the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Corresponding authors affiliated with one of the eligible CAS institutes, can publish in open access at a 20 percent discounted APC price.
  • EDP Sciences has signed with the Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) a German National APC agreement. Corresponding authors affiliated with German academic institutions including universities and research institutions, can publish in open access at a 20 percent discounted APC price.
  • Corresponding authors from French institutions having signed the National Open Access agreement in France, can publish in Open Access without any fee.

For further, updated agreements, please see the Waivers and Discounts.

1.7 Manuscript compliance with the instructions for authors

Authors are invited to carefully read the below instructions. Articles not compliant with these instructions will be immediately sent back to the author. In order to avoid these additional delays in the publication of their articles, authors should know that their articles will enter the peer review process only if they are compliant after re-submission.

A frequent reason of immediate rejection is plagiarism. Using the Similarity Check tool for all submitted articles, allows to detect even minimal plagiarism. Thus authors are invited to read the ethical standards and apply the given indications in order to avoid this sanction.

1.8 Data sharing policy

Authors may be invited to share with the peer reviewers during the article evaluation process in a confidential manner the data on which the research is based. Further, as long as the publication of data is not in opposition with patients’ privacy (in the case of a medical application), authors are invited to upload supplemental datasets related to their research to an online repository. Doing so makes it available for both human and machine reading in order to further aid the acceleration of scientific discovery.

Authors are invited to prepare and deposit their data according to the FAIR data principles. FAIR stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable. The principles are available here. To summarize this, the dataset should be findable through a complete set of metadata, including a license for re-use and a data identifier (DOI or other). The dataset is accessible when access is open. Interoperable means that the data can be used and combined with other datasets in a format that is sufficiently widely distributed. Re-usability is achieved when the dataset is deposited with a corresponding Creative Commons open license and is downloadable. Furthermore, re-usability implies that parameters describing how this dataset has been collected needs to be disclosed. Machine and experimental conditions must be documented.

1.9 ORCID

From October 2024, only authenticated ORCIDs will be published in this journal. Any ORCIDs included in the manuscript files or provided outside of the authentication process outlined below will not be included in the published article.

Corresponding authors can link their own ORCID to their profile at the time of submission. They should also enter their co-authors details (names and email addresses) in the system at this time. Co-authors listed this way will be automatically invited to confirm that they are co-authors of the manuscript, and to validate their ORCID. This must be done before article acceptance. See also EDP Sciences ORCID policy.

2 Submission Checklist

Before the submission, please:

1. Read the Aims & Scope to gain an overview and assess if your manuscript is suitable for this journal.
2. Use the Microsoft Word template to prepare your manuscript.
3. Make sure that issues about ethical standards and instructions for authors have been appropriately considered.
4. Check the submission and peer-review system.
5. Prepare the appropriate keywords.
6. Check if your title and abstract are effective.
7. Prepare the cover letter.
8. Check if you have cited sources appropriately.
9. Make sure you have written permission for any third-party materials you’ve included.
10. Make sure you included the name and affiliation of any co-authors.
11. Make sure you included a disclosure statement and declared any competing interests.
12. Make sure you are transparent in disclosing how AI tools were used in your paper in the case you use such tools.
13. Please include/create your ORCiD.
14. Ensure that all authors have approved the content of the submitted manuscript.
15. Check the files ready to upload:
    • Your manuscript: including a title page with names of all authors and co-authors, abstract, keywords, main text and references,
    • Figure files,
    • Table files,
    • Any extra files such as supplemental materials or biographical notes,
    • Cover letter.
16. You can submit at: https://sbuild.nestor-edp.org/ .

3 Manuscript Submission

3.1 Types of Publications

Sustainable Buildings has no restrictions on the length of manuscripts, provided that the text is concise and comprehensive. Full experimental details must be provided so that the results can be reproduced. Sustainable Buildings requires that authors publish all experimental controls and make full datasets available where possible.

Manuscripts submitted to Sustainable Buildings should neither be published previously nor be under consideration for publication in another journal. The main article types are as follows:

• Original Article: A research original article is a primary source. It reports the methods and results of an original study performed by the authors. The kind of study may vary (it could have been an experiment, survey, interview, etc.), but in all cases, raw data have been collected and analyzed by the authors, and conclusions drawn from the results of that analysis
• Review: A review article is a survey of previously published research on a topic. It should give an overview of current thinking on the topic. And, unlike an original research article, it will not present new experimental results. Writing a review of literature is to provide a critical evaluation of the data available from existing studies. Review articles can identify potential research areas to explore next, and sometimes they will draw new conclusions from the existing data.

3.2 Submission Process

Manuscripts for Sustainable Buildings should be submitted online at https://sbuild.nestor-edp.org/. The submitting author, who is the corresponding author, is responsible for the manuscript during the submission and peer-review process. The submitting author must ensure that all eligible co-authors have been included in the author list (read the JOURNAL POLICY ON AUTHORSHIP AND CONTRIBUTORSHIP in the Ethical Standards) and that they have all read and approved the submitted version of the manuscript.

Cover letter

Submissions should be accompanied by a concise and clear statement about the novelty or originality aspects of the scientific work and explaining why it would be of interest to the readers of this journal. This statement should point out the original features of the work, not just say that it is new. Please make sure you have read the Aims & Scope, the instructions for authors and the Ethical standards of the journal.

The following structure covers all the necessary points that need to be included.

• Specify the current professional position of the authors, for instance if they are PhD Student, Engineer, Researcher, Doctor, Post Doc, Professor, Head of Research Dept., Head of Technical or Production Dept, or other. If any of the authors does not use to login an ORCID or institutional email address, explain the reason.
• First paragraph: include the title of your manuscript and the type of manuscript it is (e.g. review, original paper etc.). Then briefly explain the background to your study, the question you sought out to answer and why.
• Second paragraph: you should concisely explain what was done, the main findings and the novelty of your work (in respect to other work performed and published for the same topic).
• Third paragraph: here you should indicate why the readers of the journal would be interested in the work. Take your cues from the journal’s aims and scope. For example, if the journal requires that all work published has broad implications explain how your study fulfils this. It is also a good idea to include a sentence on the importance of the results to the field.
• Fourth paragraph: If you have previously submitted this manuscript to another journal and it was not accepted, you may include and address the reviewer’s comments. If you choose to do so, please provide the name of the journal and the date of the decision letter. If this is the first time the manuscript is submitted to a journal write ‘this manuscript has not been submitted to another journal previously’.
• Fifth paragraph: confirm that: ‘All authors have approved the submission of this manuscript. The results have not been previously published and are not being considered for publication in another journal’. We confirm that this work is original and has not been published elsewhere, nor is it currently under consideration for publication elsewhere.
• Sixth paragraph: conflicts of interest, financial and other, should be listed. If there are none, this should be stated.
• Seventh paragraph: if the authors request specific reviewers or would like us to avoid particular reviewers, they should be listed. Please suggest three potential reviewers with the appropriate expertise to review the manuscript. The editors will not necessarily approach these referees. Please provide detailed contact information (address, homepage, phone, e-mail address). The proposed referees should neither be current collaborators of the co-authors nor have published with any of the co-authors of the manuscript within the last five years. Proposed reviewers should be from different institutions to the authors. You may identify appropriate Editorial Board members of the journal as potential reviewers.

Proposed Referees

If the authors request specific reviewers or would like us to avoid particular reviewers, they should be listed. Please suggest three potential reviewers with the appropriate expertise to review the manuscript. The editors will not necessarily approach these referees. Please provide detailed contact information (address, homepage, phone, e-mail address). The proposed referees should neither be current collaborators of the co-authors nor have published with any of the co-authors of the manuscript within the last five years. Proposed reviewers should be from different institutions to the authors. You may identify appropriate Editorial Board members of the journal as potential reviewers.

3.3 Manuscript structure

Manuscripts should be prepared according to the following order (Reviews, very long articles may use a different presentation):

• Original article
• Title
• Authors List and Affiliations
• Abstract and 4–6 keywords
• Introduction
• Materials and Methods
• Results
• Discussion
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgements
• Funding
• Conflicts of interest
• Data availability statement
• Author contribution statement
• References

For Review articles, there is no need of the ‘Materials and Methods’ section.

Title: The title of your manuscript should be concise, specific and relevant. It should identify if the study reports trial data, or is a systematic review, meta-analysis or replication study. Please do not include abbreviated or short forms of the title, such as a running title or head.

Authors List and Affiliations: Authors' full first and last names must be provided. The initials of any middle names can be added. The format for affiliations: complete address information including city, and country. At least one author should be designated as the corresponding author, and their email address and other details included at the end of the affiliation section. After acceptance, updates to author names or affiliations may not be permitted. Equal Contributions: authors who have contributed equally should be marked with a superscript letter (to their names). The letter must be in footnote, and the following statement added: “These authors contributed equally to this work”. The equal roles of authors should also be adequately disclosed in the author contribution statement. Please read the Ethical Standards.

Abstract: The abstract should be a total of about 200 words maximum, describe the main objective(s) of the study, explain how the study was done, including any model organisms used, without methodological detail, summarize the most important results and their significance. Abstracts should not include citations and abbreviations.

Keywords: Four to six pertinent keywords need to be added after the abstract. We recommend that the keywords are specific to the article, yet reasonably common within the subject discipline.

Introduction: The introduction should briefly place the study in a broad context and highlight why it is important. It should define the purpose of the work and its significance, including specific hypotheses being tested. The current state of the research field should be reviewed carefully and key publications cited. Please highlight controversial and diverging hypotheses when necessary. Finally, briefly mention the main aim of the work and highlight the main conclusions.

Materials and Methods: They should be described with sufficient detail to allow others to replicate and build on published results. New methods and protocols should be described in detail while well-established methods can be briefly described and appropriately cited, but the submission should include sufficient information to be understood independent of these references.

Results: Provide a concise and precise description of the experimental results, their interpretation as well as the experimental conclusions that can be drawn. Authors should explain how the results relate to the hypothesis presented as the basis of the study and provide a succinct explanation of the implications of the findings, particularly in relation to previous related studies and potential future directions for research.

Discussion: Authors should discuss the results and how they can be interpreted in perspective of previous studies and of the working hypotheses. The findings and their implications should be discussed in the broadest context possible and limitations of the work highlighted. Future research directions may also be mentioned. This section may be combined with Results.

Conclusions: This section is not mandatory but can be added to the manuscript if the discussion is unusually long or complex.

Acknowledgments: In this section you can acknowledge any support given which is not covered by the author contribution or funding sections. This may include administrative and technical support, or donations in kind (e.g., materials used for experiments).

Funding: All sources of funding of the study should be disclosed. Clearly indicate grants that you have received in support of your research work and if you received funds to cover publication costs. Please add: “This research received no external funding” or “This research was funded by [name of funder] grant number [xxx]” and/or “The APC was funded by [XXX]” in this section. Check carefully that the details given are accurate and use the standard spelling of funding agency names at https://search.crossref.org/funding, any errors may affect your future funding.

Conflicts of Interest: This section, which is mandatory, shall describe whether yes or no, each individual author has to disclose any kind of conflict of interest (Disclosure Statement).

Depending on the type of conflict, the following sentences are recommended to be added for each author (please use the authors’ initials here):

• For author AA receiving directly research funding please state: "AA has received funding from" and note the source.
• In case BB’s institution received any sort of support, state: "The institution of BB has received funding from…" and note the source.
• If CC received no financial support please state, "CC certifies that he or she has no financial conflicts of interest (eg., consultancies, stock ownership, equity interest, patent/licensing arrangements, etc.) in connection with this article."
• If DD has received or may receive any personal payment or other benefit from a commercial entity (eg, serve as a consultant), please note: "DD has or may receive payments or benefits from … (note the source) related to this work."

Data availability statement: In this section, please provide, if your study reports data, details regarding where data supporting reported results can be found. For more information please refer to Data sharing and reproducibility in Ethical Standards.

Author contribution statement: We expect that all authors will have reviewed, discussed, and agreed to their individual contributions ahead of this time. Contributions will be published before the references section, and they should accurately reflect contributions to the work. The following statements should be used "Conceptualization, X.X. and Y.Y.; Methodology, X.X.; Software, X.X.; Validation, X.X., Y.Y. and Z.Z.; Formal Analysis, X.X.; Investigation, X.X.; Resources, X.X.; Data Curation, X.X.; Writing – Original Draft Preparation, X.X.; Writing – Review & Editing, X.X.; Visualization, X.X.; Supervision, X.X.; Project Administration, X.X.; Funding Acquisition, Y.Y.”.

References: References should be cited in the text by placing sequential numbers in brackets (for example͵ [1]͵ [2,5,7]͵ [8–10]). They should be numbered in the order in which they are cited. The reference list comes at the end of an article and consists of an unnumbered ˝References˝ section containing references sorted according to the following referencing style:

Journals (all authors should be cited)

[1] J. Zhang, S. Hiromoto, T. Yamazaki, J. Niu, H. Huang, G. Jia, H. Li, W. Ding, G. Yuan, Effect of macrophages on in vitro corrosion behavior of magnesium alloy, J. Biomed. Mat. Res. A 104, 2476 (2016)

Books or Theses

[2] M.N. Ozisik, Radiative transfer and interactions with conduction and convection (John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1973)

[3] P. Sebastian, Analyse de réseaux de transferts: application à l’expertise de séchoirs. Thèse, Université Bordeaux I, 1992

4 Style and Format

5 Appendices and Online Supplementary Material

Please use appendices if vital to the understanding of complex formulae and in this case, treat them as normal sections. If there are equations, they should be numbered separately from those in the main text as (A.l), (A.2), etc. We encourage authors to submit multimedia attachments to enhance the online versions of published articles (animations or supplementary data such as data files, tables of extra information or extra figures, programs, etc.). For more information on the submission of this material (file requirements, etc.), please contact the Editorial Office at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . Please note that the pdf files of the Online Supplementary Material will be published online as they are produced by the Author.

Online material may include data too long to be included in the manuscript, additional illustrations and movies. Online material is subjected to strict refereeing. Formats accepted are: PDF, graphic formats for supplementary figures MPEG for videos. Files should preferably be less than 20 Mb.