Sustainability Analytics and Modeling

About Sustainability Analytics and Modeling

About Sustainability Analytics and Modeling

Sustainability Analytics and Modeling (SAM) is a peer-reviewed, fully open-access scholarly journal that brings the quantitative disciplines of analytics and operations research to bear on the defining sustainability challenges of our time. Owned by the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS) and published by Elsevier on the ScienceDirect platform, the journal was established in 2021 as a dedicated outlet for rigorous quantitative studies that deepen understanding of sustainability problems, anticipate future developments, reveal hidden interconnections, and develop actionable solutions.

The journal occupies a distinctive position in the publishing landscape. Rather than treating sustainability as a purely descriptive or policy-driven topic, it insists on analytical depth: mathematical modeling, optimization, simulation, forecasting, statistical analysis, and machine learning applied to questions that matter for people and the planet. Its subject coverage, as classified on ScienceDirect, spans Information Systems and Management, Management Science and Operations Research, and Decision Sciences more broadly — a signal that the journal speaks simultaneously to the operations research community and to applied researchers working on sustainability across domains.

Sustainability Analytics and Modeling publishes one volume per year; Volume 6 was in progress during 2026, reflecting steady annual output since the journal's launch. The journal carries the online ISSN 2667-2596 and operates as a gold open-access title, meaning every article is freely available to readers worldwide immediately upon publication, supported by an article publishing charge paid by authors or their funders.

For researchers, the journal offers something increasingly rare: a venue where methodological innovation in analytics and operations research is valued precisely because it illuminates sustainability questions — from poverty and hunger to clean energy, resilient infrastructure, and climate action. For practitioners and policymakers, it offers evidence grounded in quantitative investigation rather than assertion, including studies that translate analytical findings into concrete policy recommendations.

Aims and Scope

According to the journal's official aims statement published by IFORS, Sustainability Analytics and Modeling publishes articles that develop and apply quantitative methods of analytics and operations research to take on global sustainability challenges. Those challenges are deliberately framed in the broadest terms: poverty, hunger, health, well-being, education, equality, water, sanitation, energy, economies, industry, infrastructure systems, smart communities, consumption and production, climate, peace, and justice. Together, these topics map onto the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations, and the journal explicitly positions itself as a contributor to that global agenda.

What distinguishes the journal's scope is its insistence on the quantitative character of published work. Contributions are expected to do one or more of the following: create deeper understanding of the mechanisms that cause global sustainability challenges; provide situational awareness or future predictions; uncover interconnections between systems and explain their role in creating problems; and develop potential solutions. Papers that derive policy recommendations from quantitative investigation are explicitly encouraged, which makes the journal a natural home for decision-support research, prescriptive analytics, and evidence-based policy modeling.

In practice, this means the journal welcomes studies using optimization models for sustainable resource allocation, simulation models of energy or transportation systems, statistical and econometric analyses of sustainability indicators, forecasting models for climate or demand scenarios, data envelopment analysis and frontier methods for benchmarking sustainability performance, and machine-learning approaches to environmental and social prediction problems. Both theoretical advances in methodology and applied studies that deploy established methods on important sustainability questions fall within scope, provided the work meets scholarly standards of rigor.

The journal also commissions guest-edited special issues on timely themes. Recent examples include a special issue on innovative transport systems and their environmental impact — connected with the TransClim 2025 and InnovaLex 2025 conferences and led by guest editors from the Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport, the University of Pisa, and the University of California, Davis — and a 2024 special issue on sustainability and resilience in transportation systems. A further special-issue call on sustainable freight transportation and logistics, issued in connection with IFORS 2026, illustrates the journal's continuing emphasis on sectors where analytical modeling can reconcile economic efficiency with environmental and social objectives. Prospective authors with a coherent theme are typically able to propose special issues through the editorial office.

The audience for the journal includes operations researchers, management scientists, data scientists, industrial engineers, environmental modelers, energy systems analysts, transportation researchers, and sustainability scholars, as well as the policymakers, planners, and industry practitioners who use quantitative evidence in sustainability decision-making.

Publication Details

A note on the publishing charge: the USD 1,400 figure appears in Elsevier's own APC comparison table on the journal's ScienceDirect insights page. Elsevier operates waiver and discount programs for authors from qualifying countries and circumstances; because these programs change over time, authors should verify the current APC and any applicable waivers on the journal's official page before submitting.

Editorial Leadership and Peer Review

The founding Editor-in-Chief of Sustainability Analytics and Modeling is Professor Elise Miller-Hooks of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, United States — a widely recognized scholar in transportation systems, resilience, and operations research. Under her leadership the journal assembled an editorial team of more than forty associate editors and editorial board members drawn from institutions around the world, reflecting the global character of both IFORS and the sustainability challenges the journal addresses.

Editorial succession has been handled transparently: IFORS announced a call for applications for a new Editor-in-Chief, with the incoming editor expected to commence the role in 2026 as Professor Miller-Hooks completes her term at the end of December 2025. The appointment is structured as an initial three-year term, potentially renewable for a second three-year period. Authors and readers should check the journal's current editorial page for the serving editor-in-chief and the up-to-date roster of associate editors, since editorial teams evolve.

The journal operates an anonymous peer-review process. Elsevier-published timeline statistics for the journal give authors a realistic picture of what to expect: a median of about 5 days from submission to first decision, about 75 days from submission to decision after review, about 219 days from submission to acceptance, and about 2 days from acceptance to online publication. These figures, reported on the journal's ScienceDirect insights page, indicate a relatively fast initial screening stage followed by a thorough review phase — typical of journals that handle methodologically demanding manuscripts.

For a journal founded in 2021, the editorial infrastructure is notably mature: dozens of handling editors, regular special issues, and an active presence at IFORS conferences, including "meet the editor" sessions at EURO/IFORS meetings. This institutional backing — a global federation of operational research societies rather than a commercial publisher alone — gives the journal both scholarly credibility and a built-in community of authors, reviewers, and readers.

Indexing, Archiving, and Visibility

Sustainability Analytics and Modeling is indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), as confirmed on the journal's ScienceDirect insights page under abstracting and indexing. DOAJ listing is a meaningful quality signal for an open-access journal: it indicates the title has passed DOAJ's review of its editorial practices, licensing, and transparency.

Because the journal is young — launched in 2021 — its coverage in the large commercial citation databases should be verified at the time of submission rather than assumed. Authors whose institutions or funders require indexing in Scopus, the Web of Science Core Collection, or other specific databases should check the current master lists or the journal's own indexing statement before submitting. As a fully open-access Elsevier title on ScienceDirect, the journal's articles benefit from strong discoverability through the publisher's platform, Google Scholar, and the DOAJ, and ScienceDirect reports cumulative usage of tens of thousands of downloads alongside hundreds of Mendeley captures and social-media mentions.

Readers can browse all published volumes and issues on the journal's ScienceDirect issues page, where content is freely accessible without subscription. Authors seeking maximum visibility should note that open-access publication, combined with the journal's applied focus, tends to attract readership beyond academia — including practitioners in industry, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations working on sustainability implementation.

Why This Journal Matters: The Field in Context

Operations research was born from the challenge of making better decisions under constraints — allocating scarce resources, scheduling complex systems, and planning under uncertainty. Sustainability is, at its core, a decision problem under constraints: how to meet human needs within planetary boundaries, how to decarbonize economies without leaving communities behind, how to build infrastructure that is simultaneously efficient, resilient, and just. Sustainability Analytics and Modeling exists at exactly this intersection.

The journal's emphasis on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals connects it to the most widely adopted global framework for sustainability action. The 17 goals — from ending poverty and hunger to ensuring clean water, affordable energy, sustainable cities, responsible consumption and production, and climate action — are inherently interconnected, and quantitative modeling is one of the few tools capable of tracing those interconnections rigorously. A paper in this journal might, for example, model the trade-offs between freight efficiency and emissions, forecast renewable-energy adoption under alternative policies, or optimize humanitarian supply chains for disaster resilience.

This applied, solutions-oriented identity also explains the journal's encouragement of policy recommendations derived from quantitative work. Many methodology journals stop at the model; SAM explicitly invites authors to carry the analysis through to its implications for decision-makers. For early-career researchers, this makes the journal a valuable venue for demonstrating real-world impact; for established scholars, it offers a readership that includes the practitioners who can act on the findings.

Publishing With the Journal: Guidance for Authors

Manuscripts are submitted through Elsevier's online editorial system linked from the journal's ScienceDirect homepage. Before submitting, authors should take the following steps:

1. Confirm scope fit. Read the aims and scope statement and several recent articles. The central question editors will ask is whether the paper develops or applies quantitative analytical methods to a genuine sustainability challenge. Purely descriptive case studies without analytical modeling, or methodological papers with no sustainability application, are unlikely to fit.
2. Check the current APC and waiver eligibility. The listed article publishing charge is USD 1,400, but waiver programs for authors from developing countries and other qualifying circumstances exist. Confirm the current terms on the journal's official page, and contact the editorial office if your situation is unclear.
3. Prepare for rigorous review. With a median of 75 days from submission to decision after review, authors should expect substantive engagement from reviewers on both methodology and the sustainability relevance of the work. Manuscripts should document models, data, assumptions, and validation clearly enough for independent scrutiny.
4. Emphasize implications. Because the journal encourages policy recommendations from quantitative investigation, a strong submission articulates what decision-makers should do differently in light of the findings — not merely what the model shows.
5. Consider special issues. Guest-edited special issues on themes such as sustainable transportation and freight logistics have been a recurring feature. A special issue can offer a thematically engaged readership and editors actively seeking contributions, but standard issues remain the journal's core.
6. Verify indexing requirements. If your institution, funder, or national assessment system requires indexing in specific databases, verify the journal's current indexing status before submitting, particularly given the journal's recent founding.

Authors should also review Elsevier's general publishing ethics policies, authorship criteria, data-availability expectations, and declaration-of-interest requirements, all of which apply to this journal as they do across the publisher's portfolio.

Who Should Read and Publish Here

Sustainability Analytics and Modeling is a natural home for operations researchers and management scientists whose work engages environmental, social, or economic sustainability; for data scientists and applied statisticians modeling sustainability outcomes; for industrial and systems engineers working on sustainable design and logistics; for energy, transportation, and urban-systems researchers using optimization or simulation; and for interdisciplinary sustainability scholars who want their quantitative work evaluated by reviewers who understand both the methods and the domain.

Readers who will benefit most include graduate students learning how analytical methods translate into sustainability insight, researchers seeking models and benchmarks for their own work, and practitioners — in government, industry, and international organizations — looking for evidence-based approaches to sustainability planning. The journal's open-access model means none of these readers face a paywall.

The IFORS Connection

Understanding the journal's owner helps explain its character. The International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS) is the global federation of national operational research societies — the umbrella body that connects the OR profession across continents. IFORS organizes a triennial international conference, runs a global webinar series, publishes a newsletter, and stewards two journals: the long-established International Transactions in Operational Research (ITOR) and Sustainability Analytics and Modeling (SAM).

SAM is, in effect, IFORS's open-access flagship for the sustainability agenda — a venue created by the profession itself rather than imposed on it by a commercial publisher. That lineage matters for authors: submitting to SAM means addressing a community that already shares the journal's vocabulary of models, algorithms, and decision analysis, while reaching outward to the sustainability scientists, engineers, and policymakers who use those tools. The journal's visibility at IFORS and EURO conferences, including dedicated "meet the editor" sessions, keeps that community connection live rather than merely nominal.

When was the journal founded? It was established as an open-access journal in 2021; Volume 6 was in progress during 2026.

What article types does the journal publish? Original research articles, review articles, and contributions to guest-edited special issues on themes such as sustainable transportation and freight logistics.

Does the journal have an impact factor? As a journal founded in 2021, its standing in commercial citation rankings should be checked against current listings at the time of submission; the journal's verified indexing includes the DOAJ.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who publishes Sustainability Analytics and Modeling? The journal is owned by the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS) and published by Elsevier Ltd., appearing on the ScienceDirect platform.

What is the journal's ISSN? The online ISSN is 2667-2596.

Is the journal open access? Yes. It was established in 2021 as a fully open-access journal; all articles are freely available to readers worldwide.

What is the article publishing charge? Elsevier lists an APC of USD 1,400 for the journal. Waiver and discount programs may apply; authors should confirm current terms on the official journal page.

Who is the editor-in-chief? The founding Editor-in-Chief is Professor Elise Miller-Hooks of George Mason University. IFORS announced a search for a successor with the role commencing in 2026; check the journal's site for the current officeholder.

What topics does the journal cover? Quantitative analytics and operations research applied to global sustainability challenges — including poverty, hunger, health, water, energy, industry, infrastructure, smart communities, consumption and production, climate, peace, and justice — aligned with the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals.

How long does peer review take? Elsevier-reported medians are about 5 days from submission to first decision, about 75 days to a decision after review, and about 219 days to acceptance, with online publication about 2 days after acceptance.

Is the journal indexed in DOAJ? Yes — the Directory of Open Access Journals is listed in the journal's abstracting and indexing information on ScienceDirect. Coverage in other databases should be verified against current listings.

Does the journal publish special issues? Yes. Recent special issues have addressed sustainable and resilient transportation systems and the environmental impact of innovative transport systems, often linked to academic conferences.

When was the journal founded? It was established as an open-access journal in 2021; Volume 6 was in progress during 2026.