Aims and scope

Climate of the Past (CP) is a not-for-profit international scientific journal dedicated to the publication and discussion of research articles, short communications, and review papers on the climate history of the Earth. CP covers all temporal scales of climate change and variability, from geological time through to multidecadal studies of the last century. Studies focusing mainly on present and future climate are not within scope.

The main subject areas are the following:

• reconstructions of past climate based on instrumental and historical data as well as proxy data from marine and terrestrial (including ice) archives;
• development and validation of new proxies, improvements of the precision and accuracy of proxy data;
• theoretical and empirical studies of processes in and feedback mechanisms between all climate system components in relation to past climate change on all space scales and timescales;
• simulation of past climate and model-based interpretation of palaeoclimate data for a better understanding of present and future climate variability and climate change.

Climate of the Past has an innovative two-stage publication process which involves a scientific discussion forum and exploits the full potential of the Internet to do the following:

• foster scientific discussion;
• enhance the effectiveness and transparency of scientific quality assurance;
• enable rapid publication;
• make scientific publications freely accessible.

In the first stage, papers that pass a rapid access review by one of the editors are immediately published on the Climate of the Past Discussions (CPD) website. They are then subject to interactive public discussion, during which the referees' comments (anonymous or attributed), additional short comments by other members of the scientific community (attributed), and the authors' replies are also published in CPD. In the second stage, the peer-review process is completed and, if accepted, the final revised papers are published in CP. To ensure publication precedence for authors, and to provide a lasting record of scientific discussion, CPD and CP are both ISSN-registered, permanently archived, and fully citable.