About Trans-Himalaya Earth System Science

Trans-Himalaya Earth System Science

Overview and identity

Trans-Himalaya Earth System Science, abbreviated THESS, is an English-language, online-only, open-access journal based in Beijing, China, published through KeAi Communications with publishing services provided by Elsevier. The journal is dedicated to publishing high-quality research on the Trans-Himalaya and its regional and global influences, spanning all areas of Earth system science. Research focused on individual Earth system components, as well as interactions among those components, is welcomed.

The journal's organising idea is that the high mountains of Asia cannot be understood one discipline at a time. Glaciers, rivers, ecosystems, tectonics, climate and human communities in the region form a single, interacting system, and THESS exists to publish work that treats them that way. Submitted manuscripts undergo rigorous and thorough peer review, and the journal requires that research articles provide a novel, substantive contribution supported by robust, clearly presented and reproducible evidence.

The Trans-Himalaya domain

THESS focuses on the Trans-Himalaya domain, a region that broadly overlaps with what is often termed High Mountain Asia or the Third Pole. It encompasses the Tibetan Plateau and interconnected mountain regions, including, but not limited to, the Tien Shan, Pamir, Karakoram, Hindu Kush-Himalaya, Hengduan Shan, Qilian Shan, Altai and Caucasus, together with the full range of landscapes and environments across the region.

The Third Pole framing is well established in the scientific literature. The Tibetan Plateau and surrounding mountains represent one of the largest ice masses on Earth: the region covers about five million square kilometres, with an average elevation of more than 4,000 metres and more than 100,000 square kilometres of glaciers, and it is regarded as one of the most sensitive and readily visible indicators of climate change. Its rivers — including the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Mekong, Yangtze and Yellow River — sustain populations far beyond the mountains themselves. THESS also considers the regional and global impacts, feedbacks and teleconnections associated with this domain, while research focused on other alpine locations, such as the Alps, Andes or Rockies, is considered only if there is direct relevance or comparison to the Trans-Himalaya.

The six spheres: anthroposphere, atmosphere and biosphere

The journal structures its scope around the interacting spheres of the Earth system. Its anthroposphere theme covers the human dimension: sustainable development, risk reduction, archaeology and anthropology, and land use. Its atmosphere theme covers atmospheric chemistry and physics, climate impacts, climate dynamics and variability, meteorology, paleoclimate and extreme events.

Its biosphere theme covers biodiversity, conservation, ecosystem services, carbon cycling, soil science, ecology, microbiology and vegetation dynamics. Including the anthroposphere alongside the physical spheres is a deliberate choice: in the Trans-Himalaya, settlement, grazing, agriculture, infrastructure and heritage are not external pressures on an otherwise natural system but part of the system the journal studies, and questions of risk reduction and sustainable development are therefore treated as Earth system questions in their own right.

The six spheres: cryosphere, geosphere and hydrosphere

The cryosphere theme covers glaciers, permafrost, snow, river and lake ice, glacier collapse, glacial lake outburst floods, avalanches and paleoclimate. The geosphere theme covers tectonics, geochemistry, geodynamics, geophysics, hazards and geomorphology — the deep processes that built the plateau and its ranges and that continue to shape them through earthquakes, uplift and erosion.

The hydrosphere theme covers rivers, lakes, water resources, socio-hydrology, groundwater, hydrogeology and the water cycle. In addition to the six sphere themes, the journal explicitly welcomes work on cross-sphere processes and interactions: for example, how glacier retreat changes river flow, how permafrost thaw releases carbon, how tectonic uplift steers atmospheric circulation, or how changing water availability reshapes ecosystems and livelihoods downstream.

What research articles must show

THESS sets four explicit tests that research articles must meet. They must focus on the Trans-Himalaya region or its regional and global connections; they must address a clearly defined Earth system science question; they must provide a novel, substantive contribution; and they must present conclusions supported by robust and reproducible evidence. Manuscripts that merely describe a local phenomenon without advancing understanding of the Trans-Himalaya Earth system fall outside the journal's stated bar.

That framing mirrors the rationale set out by the research community itself. The background statement for the first International Conference on Trans-Himalaya Earth System Sciences, planned for Kathmandu, noted that the Trans-Himalayas — home to all summits exceeding 8,000 metres in elevation — are highly sensitive to climate change because of their extensive ice, snow, permafrost and carbon reserves, that cryospheric melt affects more than two billion people downstream, and that environmental research in the region faces significant uncertainties in quantifying climate change and its cross-sectoral impacts, highlighting the urgent need for a comprehensive Earth system approach. The conference's scientific themes — glacier melt and Earth system consequences; ecosystems, biodiversity and global change; tectonic uplift of the Trans-Himalayas and its impacts; and climate change, impacts and adaptation — map closely onto the journal's sphere-based scope.

Article types

The journal publishes five article types, each with defined requirements in its Guide for Authors. Full-length articles present original, high-quality research that advances scientific understanding and clearly articulates significance for the Trans-Himalaya region, developing a coherent and complete scientific story; they run to approximately 5,000 words, with up to eight display items, a maximum 250-word abstract and approximately 80 references. Short communications report an important, focused scientific advance that can be communicated clearly and convincingly in a concise format, at approximately 2,500 words with up to four display items.

Reviews are authoritative, comprehensive and critical syntheses of established and emerging research fields. The journal stresses that reviews are not mere compilations of literature, but scholarly works that integrate existing evidence, critically evaluate current understanding, identify key knowledge gaps and controversies, and propose coherent future research directions; they run to approximately 8,000 words with approximately 220 references. Perspectives, at approximately 7,000 words, use critical synthesis to develop original interpretations, concepts or ideas that advance understanding, critically re-examine established thinking or open new directions for research. Commentaries are concise, timely essays of approximately 1,200 words that examine important issues, debates and challenges affecting scientific progress, policy, research practices or the wider research community, presenting evidence-informed arguments intended to stimulate discussion.

Peer review and editorial standards

THESS follows a single anonymized review process. Submissions are initially assessed by the editors to determine suitability; suitable manuscripts are typically sent to a minimum of two reviewers for an independent expert assessment of scientific quality, and the editors' decision to accept or reject is final. The editorial office first reviews all manuscripts and desk-rejects papers that fail basic standards — for example for being out of scope, raising ethical conflicts, showing high similarity to existing work, lacking originality or having flaws in research design or methods — before selected papers pass to the Editor-in-Chief, who invites reviewers directly or assigns an editorial board member to do so.

Editors are not involved in decisions about papers they have written themselves, papers by family members or colleagues, or papers relating to products or services in which they have an interest; such submissions are handled independently. Special procedures also apply to submissions from editors, guest editors and board members, which are handled confidentially by a different team member, and to special-issue submissions where a guest editor has a conflict of interest. Submissions to KeAi journals are automatically screened using iThenticate's CrossCheck to detect overlapping and similar text, and authors are encouraged to provide an ORCID ID at submission.

Open access and publication charges

As an open-access journal, THESS makes all articles immediately and permanently free for everyone to read and download. Reuse is governed by Creative Commons licences: CC BY permits distribution, copying, adaptation and derivative works, including for commercial purposes, with appropriate credit and a link to the licence, while CC BY-NC-ND permits distribution and copying for non-commercial purposes without alteration.

The article publishing charge is USD 2,000 plus taxes. However, all article processing charges for articles submitted to the journal before 1 January 2028 will be fully waived. For a research community that includes many scientists working in mountain regions and institutions with limited publication funds, a multi-year waiver of that size materially lowers the barrier to publishing in a new international journal during its formative period.

Relation to Third Pole research programmes

The journal's scope sits within a longer institutional history of coordinated research on the region. The Third Pole Environment (TPE) programme, developed with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and international partners, set out to attract research institutions and academic talent to focus on water–ice–air–ecosystem–human interactions, to reveal environmental change processes and mechanisms on the Third Pole and their influences on and responses to global change, and to serve human adaptation to a changing environment. Its premise — that unique interactions among the atmosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere on the Third Pole ensure the permanent flow of Asia's major rivers and influence the social and economic development of countries where a fifth of the world's population lives — is the same premise on which THESS organises its six-sphere scope, extended to include the geosphere and the human sphere explicitly.

The journal is also listed by the Mountain Research Initiative among the journals dedicated to mountains as a theme, placing it in the small set of venues whose primary identity is a mountain region rather than a single discipline.

Publisher context

THESS is published through KeAi Communications, a Beijing-based joint venture co-founded by China Science Publishing & Media and Elsevier, two of the world's leading scientific, technical and medical publishers. Since it was repurposed in 2013 as an open-access journal publishing service provider, KeAi has developed a portfolio of more than 280 scholarly journals across all scientific disciplines, drawing on its parents' publishing and technology capabilities, including ScienceDirect hosting, editorial systems, data analytics and production.

For a journal whose subject is a region spanning many countries and whose evidence base ranges from satellite remote sensing and ice-core paleoclimate to archaeology and socio-hydrology, that combination — a Beijing publishing base with global distribution infrastructure, an online-only format, and an explicitly cross-sphere scope — defines THESS's place in the landscape: a regional journal in subject, an Earth-system journal in method, and an international journal in reach.