Publication Guide
Wageningen Academic Publishers is a specialist publisher in agriculture, food science, animal and insect science, and the wider life sciences. Founded in 2002 in Wageningen, the Netherlands - the historic home of Wageningen University & Research and the successor operation to Wageningen Pers - it built a compact but internationally recognized portfolio of roughly six peer-reviewed journals plus a substantial program of books, textbooks, and conference proceedings.
Ownership has changed twice in recent years, and this matters for authors. Brill acquired full ownership of Wageningen Academic in April 2022, and in 2024 Brill itself merged with the German publisher De Gruyter to form De Gruyter Brill. The old wageningenacademic.com website now redirects to brill.com, and Wageningen Academic titles are hosted and sold through De Gruyter Brill's platforms. Editorially the journals continue with the same scopes and communities; administratively, submissions, open-access fees, and institutional agreements now run through De Gruyter Brill.
Which Wageningen Academic journal fits your paper?
| You're working on... | Consider this journal |
|---|---|
| Edible insects, insect farming, insects as protein for food or animal feed | Journal of Insects as Food and Feed - the flagship title and the leading specialist venue in this fast-growing field. |
| Probiotics, prebiotics, gut microbiota, and microbes beneficial to human or animal health | Beneficial Microbes - established 2010; indexed in Scopus and PubMed-listed databases. |
| Mycotoxins in food and feed chains: detection, toxicology, regulation | World Mycotoxin Journal - the dedicated international mycotoxin venue. |
| Exercise physiology, biomechanics and nutrition of sport and working animals (equine focus) | Comparative Exercise Physiology - a niche but well-cited venue for animal exercise science. |
| Applied animal feeding and nutrition science | Journal of Applied Animal Nutrition - practice-oriented animal nutrition research. |
| Agri-food supply chains, networks and agribusiness organization | Journal on Chain and Network Science - the portfolio's social-science venue for chain and network research. |
What Wageningen Academic publishes
- Journals - around six specialist peer-reviewed titles concentrated in agri-food and life sciences, including Journal of Insects as Food and Feed, Beneficial Microbes, World Mycotoxin Journal, Comparative Exercise Physiology, Journal of Applied Animal Nutrition, and Journal on Chain and Network Science.
- Books and textbooks - monographs and teaching texts in animal science, food safety, plant science, and environmental science, distributed worldwide.
- Conference proceedings - notably in animal science and insect-sector research, often tied to European research networks.
The portfolio is small by design: these are community journals with tight scopes, which is exactly why they attract concentrated, field-specific readerships rather than broad multidisciplinary traffic.
Open access and APCs
Wageningen Academic journals offer gold, hybrid and green open-access routes, with articles typically published under CC BY or CC BY-NC licenses.
| Route | What it means here |
|---|---|
| Gold / hybrid OA | Pay an APC to make your article immediately open access; typical fees run roughly €1,500 - €2,500 per article, varying by journal. Always check the journal's current price page on the De Gruyter Brill site before submitting. |
| Green OA | Self-archiving of the accepted manuscript is permitted; embargo terms vary by title - check Sherpa Romeo for the specific journal. |
| Institutional agreements | Since the Brill acquisition, read-and-publish coverage runs through De Gruyter Brill's institutional agreements. Ask your library whether your institution's deal covers Wageningen Academic titles. |
No blanket low- and middle-income-country waiver policy is published centrally; authors who need a waiver or discount should contact the journal's editorial office or De Gruyter Brill directly.
Peer review
Wageningen Academic journals use conventional editor-managed peer review, generally single- or double-anonymized depending on the title. As small specialist journals, they draw reviewers from tightly knit research communities - expect substantive, expert reports. Turnaround times vary by journal and are not published centrally, so check the individual journal page or recent editorials for current expectations.
How to submit
- Pick the journal whose scope genuinely matches your paper - with only ~6 titles, scope fit is easy to check and editors enforce it.
- Read the author guidelines on the journal's page (now hosted via brill.com / De Gruyter Brill; the old wageningenacademic.com URLs redirect there).
- Format your manuscript. Reference styles vary by title - Vancouver-style numbered or Harvard-style author-date - and SciSpace templates handle the formatting for you.
- Submit through the journal's online submission system linked from its De Gruyter Brill journal page; the platform used varies by title.
- After acceptance, choose your open-access route and confirm whether an institutional agreement covers your APC.
Ethics and integrity
Wageningen Academic is a COPE member, and its journals follow COPE guidance on authorship, plagiarism, corrections and retractions. As part of De Gruyter Brill, its titles also sit under the parent group's research-integrity and publishing-ethics policies. The portfolio carries no predatory-publishing concerns: these are long-established, indexed, society-adjacent specialist journals, and the scholarly debate around the publisher has centered on the ownership transitions, not on editorial legitimacy.
