About the International Marine Science Journal

The ocean is not a single subject. A question about where a fish population goes, or why a stretch of coast is eroding, or how much carbon a shelf sea holds, is rarely answered inside one discipline: it needs hydrography, chemistry and population biology at once, usually at different scales, and often from data gathered under difficult field conditions.

IMSJ exists to publish that work and to keep it readable together. The journal treats marine systems as coupled systems — physical circulation, chemical cycling, biological communities, the sediment and seafloor beneath them, and the human pressures and resource use that act on all four — rather than as separate fields that happen to share a study site.

Its second purpose is access. Marine research is used well beyond the group that produced it: by scientists working in other basins, by fisheries and coastal-management agencies, and by researchers in countries that carry the coastline but not always the subscription budget. Publishing every article open access, under a license that permits reuse with attribution, is a practical response to that.

IMSJ is a scholarly journal, not an advocacy organization. It publishes evidence about marine systems, including evidence of pressure and of recovery, and leaves the argument to the literature.

IMSJ considers observational, experimental and modeling work across four foundational disciplines: physical oceanography and hydrodynamics; marine biogeochemistry and chemical oceanography; marine ecology and ecosystem dynamics; and marine geology and sedimentology. Ocean–climate interactions, coastal zone processes, marine pollution, marine microbiology, marine biotechnology and natural products, and ocean observation and technology are within scope on the same terms.

Interdisciplinary submissions are welcome, and the test applied to them is a substantive one: the marine or oceanographic contribution has to be central to the work, not incidental to it. A study does not become marine science because it was carried out near a coast or because the organism lives in water. Equally, work drawing on climate science, environmental chemistry, remote sensing or resource management is not excluded for doing so, provided the marine science is doing real work in the argument.

Human clinical trials, patient-care studies and epidemiology centered on human health are outside scope. Adjacent work, including preclinical marine biotechnology, engineering and quantitative or qualitative governance research, is considered when its marine-science or marine-resource-management contribution is substantive.

Subject eligibility, the accepted article types and the full boundary statement are set out on the Aims and Scope page, which is the source of record for scope. Work published to date is listed in the Archives.

Marine research is often carried out in the field, on animals, in protected places, or on stocks that people depend on. The journal's integrity requirements are shaped by that. The summary below states the principles; the operative rules are on the Editorial Policies page.