Animals

About Animals

Animals — Journal Profile

Animals is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal devoted entirely to animals, published by MDPI in Basel, Switzerland under the electronic ISSN 2076-2615. MDPI describes it as an interdisciplinary scholarly journal covering zoology, ethnozoology, animal science, animal ethics and animal welfare, together with the veterinary sciences. The JournalsWorld record for this title, under the slug animals, carried that single ISSN and a Switzerland country attribution, and this profile is anchored to that live record. Few general animal-science titles have grown as fast. The journal began publishing with its first volume in 2011 — the United States National Library of Medicine catalogue notes that some articles in volume 1 appeared online in 2010, and that the title is catalogued as Animals (Basel) with the abbreviation Animals (Basel) — and it has since become one of the largest venues in the world for research on domesticated, captive and wild animals and on the relationship between animals and human society.

The positioning of the journal matters for any author considering it. MDPI states a clear preference for articles that provide an understanding of animals within a larger context — that is, animals in interaction with the outside world, including humans — rather than narrow studies detached from that wider setting. Two boundaries in the publisher's own aims deserve emphasis because they shape editorial decisions every week. First, work involving animals must come with the necessary ethical approval, and articles describing animals being subjected to unnecessary pain or suffering are refused. Second, MDPI states that Animals does not publish articles describing the use of animals solely to provide information of relevance to humans, for example for the development of human medicines, and it does not publish results of tests of commercial products that offer no fundamental scientific advance. An author whose study is, in substance, a biomedical animal-model paper or a product test should therefore look elsewhere, however competently the work was done, while an author whose study explains something about the animal itself, its welfare, its ecology or its place alongside people is speaking directly to the journal's stated mission.

Quick facts

• Full title: Animals
• Title abbreviation: Animals (Basel)
• ISSN: 2076-2615 (electronic; the single ISSN carried by this JournalsWorld record and used by MDPI)
• Publisher: MDPI, Basel, Switzerland
• Country: Switzerland
• Language: English
• First volume: 2011 (some volume 1 articles online in 2010, per the NLM Catalog)
• Frequency: Semimonthly online, as described by MDPI
• Access model: Full open access under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence; copyright retained by the authors
• Article processing charge: CHF 2,400, as published on MDPI's article processing charge page for the journal at the time of checking
• Affiliated organisations named by MDPI: World Association of Zoos and Aquariums (WAZA), European College of Animal Welfare and Behavioural Medicine (ECAWBM), and Federation of European Laboratory Animal Science Associations (FELASA), whose members receive a discount on the article processing charge
• Editorial office contact given by MDPI: animals@mdpi.com
• Status: Active and open for submission

History and identity

Animals belongs to the generation of large, online-only, open access journals that MDPI built from Basel in the 2010s, and its history is best read as a story of a broad remit meeting a very large research community. Animal science in the older sense — livestock production, nutrition and breeding — was already served by long-established society and commercial titles. What a title launched in 2011 could add was breadth in three directions at once: towards wildlife ecology and conservation, towards the fast-growing science of animal welfare and behaviour, and towards the ethical and social study of how people keep, use, protect and live alongside animals. The journal's own subject structure, set out below, still shows exactly that three-way stretch, from physiology and phylogeny through predator–prey dynamics to pest management, animal-derived food, animal diseases and public health, and cross-cultural perspectives on animals.

Growth followed from that breadth, from continuous online publication, and from the special issue model that MDPI operates across its portfolio, under which guest-edited collections gather papers on focused themes inside the parent journal. MDPI's journal page counted more than 26,000 articles in the title at the time of checking, a scale that places Animals among the biggest animal-focused journals anywhere. Scale cuts both ways, and this profile returns to the point in the metrics section: a journal publishing at this volume offers authors speed, visibility and a near-certain audience of fellow specialists, while asking them to make the case, in the paper itself, for why the work adds substantial new insight, which is the standard MDPI prints in its aims.

The journal also sits inside a wider MDPI animal-science cluster. MDPI names Birds, Ruminants, Zoonotic Diseases and Zoos as companion journals, and groups Animals with titles including Dairy, Insects, Pets, Poultry and Veterinary Sciences in a Journal Cluster of Animal Science. For authors, that cluster is practical information: a manuscript judged too narrow or too specialised for the broad parent title may be offered a transfer path towards a sibling, and a manuscript on a single taxon or production sector can be aimed directly at the sibling whose readership matches it most closely.

Scope and subject areas

MDPI organises the scope of Animals under four headings, and authors should map a planned submission against them honestly before writing a covering letter. Under zoology, the journal covers the physiology and physical structure of animals — breeding mechanisms, nutritional needs and development among the named examples — and its relevance to the ecosystem in which the animals live, together with evolution, phylogeny, genetics, taxonomy and biodiversity. Under ecology and conservation, it covers the protection and restoration of endangered and threatened species, the abundance and distribution of animals and the relevance of both to the sustainability of the ecosystem, and predator–prey dynamics and interactions between animals in ecological communities. Under animal management and welfare science, it covers behavioural and psychological responses of animals to human activity and to the environment, the management of captive and domesticated animals, and the rehabilitation of animals into the wild. Under animals and society, it covers animal ethics and the morality of the use of animals in human society, pest management, animal-derived food, animal diseases and public health, and ethnobiological and cross-cultural perspectives.

Across those headings MDPI adds two further signals about what editors welcome. Preference is given to interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary research that provides an integrated understanding of animals and their relationships with humans, and standards and guidelines relating to animal welfare — including comments and suggestions on such standards — are particularly welcome. In practice the published journal ranges wider than any list can capture: livestock nutrition and genetics, poultry and aquaculture science, companion animal behaviour and health, zoo and wildlife management, shelter medicine, farm animal welfare assessment, precision livestock farming with sensors and imaging, and philosophical and legal writing on the moral standing of animals all appear. The common thread the editors ask for is a contribution that teaches readers something substantial about animals in context, reported with full experimental detail. MDPI is explicit that full experimental details and the method of study must be provided for research articles, and that there is no restriction on the maximum length of papers, because the journal aims to encourage scientists to publish experimental and theoretical research in as much detail as possible.

Article types named in the aims are original research articles, reviews and communications; MDPI's special issue pages for the journal also invite short notes in some calls. Reviews are a large part of the journal's citation profile, and communications suit shorter, timely findings. Whatever the type, submissions that involve live animals must show the required ethical approval, in line with the publisher's ethical guidelines, and MDPI states that manuscripts should not have been published previously or be under consideration elsewhere, conference proceedings papers excepted.

Publisher and editorial model

MDPI, founded in Basel and operating as an open access publisher of online journals, runs Animals through a central editorial office — reachable at animals@mdpi.com — working with an academic editorial board and with guest editors for special issues. MDPI is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), and states that submissions are checked with iThenticate against previous publications to verify originality, under ethical policies the publisher describes as carrying a zero tolerance approach to plagiarism, data falsification and inappropriate authorship credit. Peer review for the journal is described by MDPI in its special issue guidance as a single-anonymized process, in which manuscripts are thoroughly refereed. Authors should keep in mind the practical consequence of the model: decisions are fast by the standards of the field, the editorial office rather than a single handling academic drives much of the correspondence, and clear presentation — well formatted papers in good English, as MDPI asks — materially helps a manuscript through both the office pre-check and review.

Metrics — read them with attribution

Several different numbers circulate for this journal, and they measure different things over different windows, so this profile attributes each figure to the source that published it rather than merging them into a single headline. MDPI itself reports a Journal Rank of JCR Q1 in Veterinary Sciences and CiteScore Q1 in General Veterinary on the journal's home page at the time of checking, and reports rapid publication performance: a first decision provided approximately 15.7 days after submission, and acceptance to publication undertaken in 2.6 days, both given as median values for papers published in the journal in the first half of 2026. Those speed figures are the publisher's own medians for that stated period, and individual manuscripts — particularly those sent for full external review or needing major revision — will take longer.

OpenAlex, checked for this profile through its ISSN endpoint for 2076-2615, resolved the title to its source record for Animals and reported, at the time of checking, 61,909 works and 651,834 citations, with a two-year mean citedness of about 3.17 and summary statistics including an h-index of 127. OpenAlex counts are drawn from its own open scholarly graph, they grow as the graph is rebuilt, and the two-year mean citedness is a different calculation from the Clarivate Journal Impact Factor; readers should not treat the two as interchangeable. The JournalsWorld stored record for this post carried an impact factor figure of 3.2 and an h-index of 114 from its earlier data import; where such stored figures differ from a live source, the live, attributed source should govern, which is why this profile foregrounds the publisher's rank statements and the OpenAlex figures actually fetched during checking. A SCImago quartile or SJR value for the current year could not be verified from a page fetched for this profile, and is therefore stated as could not be verified rather than repeated from the older template text.

For an author, the balanced reading is this: Animals is a high-volume, well indexed, Q1-ranked title in veterinary and animal sciences on its publisher's reporting, with citation performance in the solid middle of its field rather than at the level of the small, highly restrictive society titles. Its enormous article count means an individual paper competes for attention inside the journal as well as outside it, and well chosen keywords, a clear significance framing, and a title that states the species and the finding plainly are worth real effort.

Indexing and visibility

MDPI lists the journal as indexed within Scopus, the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE, Web of Science), PubMed, PubMed Central (PMC), Embase, PubAg, AGRIS, the Animal Science Database and CAB Abstracts, among other databases. The National Library of Medicine catalogue records the title as in PubMed from volume 1, 2011, while noting it is not currently indexed for MEDLINE — a distinction worth understanding: articles are discoverable through PubMed and archived in PMC because of the open access deposit, which is what most veterinary and animal-science readers in practice use. A search of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) API for ISSN 2076-2615 returned one listing for the journal at the time of checking, consistent with its full open access model. Indexing claims change over time as databases review titles, so authors with an institutional requirement tied to one specific database should confirm the current listing in that database before submitting.

Fees and open access terms

All articles in Animals are published in full open access, distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, with copyright retained by the authors, as MDPI states on the journal's aims page. The article processing charge published by MDPI for the journal at the time of checking is CHF 2,400 (Swiss francs), payable for papers accepted after peer review; MDPI states that the charge covers peer review, copyediting, typesetting, long-term archiving and journal management, that invoices are issued by MDPI after acceptance, and that payment can also be made in euros, US dollars, pound sterling, Japanese yen or Canadian dollars, with local VAT or sales tax added where applicable. Discounts are described for authors at institutions taking part in MDPI's Institutional Open Access Program and for members of affiliated societies, and MDPI notes that members of WAZA, ECAWBM and FELASA receive a discount on the charge for this journal. There is no subscription route for readers, because there is nothing to subscribe to: everything is free to read. Authors without grant cover for the charge should establish their funding position before submission rather than after acceptance.

How to submit

Submissions are made online through MDPI's submission system, reached from the journal's pages at mdpi.com, after registering and logging in. Before submitting, read the journal's Instructions for Authors page, as MDPI directs, and prepare the manuscript to the MDPI template with full experimental detail, an ethics statement covering the approvals obtained for any work with animals, and the declarations MDPI requires. State the section or special issue the paper is aimed at where relevant — the journal is organised into subject sections, and special issues carry their own deadlines and guest editors, with planned papers for a special issue sometimes assessed first from a title and a short abstract sent to the editorial office. Submitted papers should be well formatted and in good English; MDPI offers its own English editing and author services, which are optional. After submission the paper passes an editorial office pre-check, then single-anonymized peer review, then revision and acceptance, with the article processing charge invoiced after acceptance and the accepted paper published continuously online once ready, rather than waiting for a complete issue. Given the journal's stated exclusions, the covering information should make two things obvious at first reading: that the work is about the animals themselves and their context, not solely a human-medicine model or a commercial product test; and that every necessary ethical approval was in place.

Similar and companion journals

Authors weighing Animals against neighbours should compare remit as well as metrics. Inside the MDPI portfolio, Veterinary Sciences leans clinical, Ruminants, Poultry, Dairy and Pets serve single-sector communities, and Zoonotic Diseases takes the animal–human disease interface that Animals touches only in part. Outside MDPI, the long-standing alternatives include Animal, the journal of the animal science societies published by Elsevier, Journal of Animal Science from the American Society of Animal Science, Applied Animal Behaviour Science for behaviour and welfare work, Animal Welfare, and the veterinary titles such as BMC Veterinary Research and Frontiers in Veterinary Science for open access clinical and population research. Wildlife and conservation manuscripts compete instead with journals such as Journal of Zoology and the conservation biology titles. The practical question is audience: Animals reaches a very large, broad animal-science readership quickly and openly, while a society title may reach a smaller readership that is exactly the author's own professional community.

Frequently asked questions

What is the ISSN of Animals? 2076-2615, the electronic ISSN used by MDPI and carried by this JournalsWorld record. The journal is online only, and no separate print ISSN is listed in the sources fetched for this profile.

Who publishes Animals and where? MDPI, from Basel, Switzerland. The NLM Catalog records the publisher place as Basel and the publisher as Molecular Diversity Preservation International, MDPI's full name.

Is Animals open access? Yes, fully. Articles are free to read under a CC BY licence, copyright stays with the authors, and an article processing charge of CHF 2,400 — as published by MDPI at the time of checking — applies to accepted papers, with discounts described for institutional programme members and affiliated society members.

Is Animals indexed in PubMed and Scopus? MDPI lists Scopus, SCIE (Web of Science), PubMed, PMC, Embase, PubAg, AGRIS, the Animal Science Database and CAB Abstracts among its indexing services. The NLM Catalog notes PubMed coverage from 2011 and that the title is not currently indexed for MEDLINE, which is a different, narrower service.

How fast is Animals? MDPI reports, as medians for papers published in the first half of 2026, a first decision approximately 15.7 days after submission and acceptance to publication in 2.6 days. Your own manuscript may be slower, especially at revision.

What will Animals not publish? On MDPI's own statement: work subjecting animals to unnecessary pain or suffering, work submitted without the necessary ethical approval, articles describing the use of animals solely to give information of relevance to humans such as human medicine development, and tests of commercial products offering no fundamental scientific advance.

Is there a maximum paper length? MDPI states there is no restriction on the maximum length of papers, and asks in return that research articles give full experimental details and the method of study.

Does Animals appear in DOAJ? A DOAJ API search on the journal's ISSN returned one listing at the time of checking, as expected for a fully open access title.

A note on this profile

This profile was researched from the journal's own publisher pages (MDPI's aims and scope, journal home and article processing charge pages), the National Library of Medicine catalogue entry, the DOAJ search API and the OpenAlex source record resolved from the journal's ISSN, each fetched during the checking for this batch. Figures are attributed to their sources in the text and describe the position at the time of checking; journal charges, indexing and editorial arrangements change, and the publisher's current pages govern. Where a figure could not be verified from a fetched source, this profile says so rather than repeating older directory data.