About ChemistryEurope

ChemistryEurope

Overview

ChemistryEurope is the flagship journal of Chemistry Europe, the publishing association of sixteen European chemical societies, and it is published by Wiley-VCH in Weinheim, Germany. It is a gold open access journal covering all areas of chemistry and adjacent sciences, launched with its first volume in 2023. Its online ISSN is 2751-4765, the number printed on its Wiley Online Library journal page, carried in its article DOIs under the code ceur, and recorded in the JournalsWorld entry for the title. The styling of the name — one word, ChemistryEurope — is deliberate: the journal is the namesake of the association itself.

Identity needs care here, because the Chemistry Europe family contains a famous older sibling. Chemistry — A European Journal, founded in 1995, ISSN 0947-6539 in print and 1521-3765 online, is a weekly subscription-era flagship with a long citation record. ChemistryEurope is not that journal, not a renaming of it, and not its open access edition. It is a separate, younger, fully open access flagship created in 2023, with its own ISSN, its own editors, its own article numbering and its own DOI code. Any profile, citation or metric that mixes the two titles is wrong, and this profile keeps them strictly apart.

The journal's stated ambition is breadth at high level: authoritative research spanning chemistry and neighbouring disciplines, presenting chemistry as a central science, open to authors worldwide rather than only to members of the European societies that own it. Its recent contents justify the breadth claim — total synthesis of a rare macrolactone, chiral helicene chemistry, peptide-targeted fluorescent probes for brain disorders, mechanochemistry, single-particle studies of organocatalysis, frustrated Lewis pair catalysis and metallo-organic cage design all appear within a few issues of each other.

Chemistry Europe: the association behind the journal

Chemistry Europe was founded in 1995 and brings together sixteen chemical societies from fifteen European countries, representing more than 75,000 chemists, according to the association's own descriptions published through Wiley-VCH and its member societies. The participating societies include the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker of Germany, the Royal Spanish Chemical Society, the Italian Chemical Society, the French Chemical Society, the Polish Chemical Society, the Portuguese Chemical Society, the Dutch and Belgian and Austrian and Swiss societies, and their counterparts in the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Slovakia and Sweden.

That ownership structure explains the portfolio the journal sits within. Chemistry Europe's journals, all published by Wiley-VCH, include Chemistry — A European Journal, the European Journal of Organic Chemistry, the European Journal of Inorganic Chemistry, ChemBioChem, ChemCatChem, ChemElectroChem, ChemMedChem, ChemPhysChem, ChemPlusChem, ChemSusChem, ChemSystemsChem, ChemistryOpen, Chemistry—Methods, ChemistrySelect, Batteries and Supercaps, and the ChemistryViews magazine portal. ChemistryEurope was added in 2023 as the portfolio's namesake gold open access flagship — the title meant to carry the association's identity in the open access era, much as ChemistryOpen had earlier been its first fully open access, society-owned journal in 2012.

The societies signalled the strategic direction publicly in 2022, committing to open access across the portfolio, converting established titles toward author-pays open models, and announcing ChemistryEurope as a new gold open access journal for high-quality, high-impact work across all of chemistry. The first issue of volume 1 appeared in 2023, promoted by member societies to their national communities. Understanding that launch context matters for authors: this is a journal built to be a flagship, resourced and promoted accordingly, but one whose citation record necessarily begins in 2023.

Bibliographic identity

Wiley's journal page gives the identifiers directly: online ISSN 2751-4765 and print ISSN 2751-4765, the same number for both, with copyright held by Wiley-VCH GmbH, Weinheim. Article DOIs use the Wiley prefix 10.1002 with the journal code ceur, in forms such as 10.1002/ceur followed by a year-based or sequential article number; recent 2026 articles carry numbers in the 70300s alongside year-based numbers of the 202500xxx pattern, reflecting Wiley's article workflows. Issues are organised by volume and number — volume 4 in 2026, consistent with a 2023 volume 1 — and individual articles appear online first with cover features highlighted per issue.

Cataloguers should note the trap built into this title. Search results for the journal's name return the association, the magazine ChemistryViews, a dozen sibling journals, and the older Chemistry — A European Journal, whose Wikipedia presence and metrics dwarf the young flagship's. The only reliable anchors are the ISSN 2751-4765 and the DOI code ceur. A record that pairs the name ChemistryEurope with ISSN 0947-6539 or 1521-3765 has conflated the two flagships; a record that pairs it with 2751-4765 and Wiley-VCH is correct, as the JournalsWorld record does.

The JournalsWorld entry also records the publisher as Wiley-VCH, matching Wiley's own page. No print subscription product should be inferred from the identical print ISSN listing: the journal is presented by its publisher as an open access title, read online, with articles free to all readers.

Editorial leadership

Wiley's current journal page names the chief editors as Luisa De Cola and Lars C. Grabow, with Anne Nijs as managing editor. At launch the editorial leadership was presented as a trio: De Cola, of the University of Milan and the Mario Negri Institute in Italy, a leader in supramolecular and luminescent materials; Ken Tanaka of the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan, known for catalysis; and, from January 2024, Lars C. Grabow of the University of Houston in the United States, the Dan Luss Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, whose work centres on catalysis and surface science and who brought a United States base to the leadership. The current page listing two chief editors reflects the board as Wiley presents it now; editorial teams evolve, and the live journal page is the authoritative roster.

The editors' own launch statements define the journal's peer-review philosophy with unusual explicitness: a fair process held to the highest standards, timely decisions, and the explicit goal of building a high-impact gold open access journal for chemical science and technology within the Chemistry Europe portfolio. Professional editors in Wiley's offices support the academic editors, backed by an editorial advisory board — the standard Wiley-VCH structure for society flagships, combining academic direction with full-time editorial staff.

Metrics displayed on the Wiley page — an acceptance rate shown as 59 percent and a median of 25 days from submission to first decision at the time this profile was researched — should be read as the publisher's current self-reported figures, which Wiley updates and which have moved between snapshots. They indicate a selective but not forbidding journal with a fast first-decision culture; they are not guarantees for any individual manuscript.

Scope: all of chemistry, deliberately

ChemistryEurope publishes across the whole discipline: organic, inorganic, organometallic, physical, theoretical, analytical, biological, medicinal, materials, energy and environmental chemistry, plus work in adjacent areas where chemistry is the driving science. Its recent article stream demonstrates each territory. Synthesis appears in the total synthesis of chaxalactin B and in regioselective platinum-catalysed hydrosilylation with carbon dioxide carboxylation. Catalysis appears in frustrated Lewis pair chemistry, metal-ligand cooperative porphyrin complexes for water activation, and nickel nanoparticle C1 chemistry studied by combined computation and operando spectroscopy. Materials and photophysics appear in boron-doped polycyclic aromatics, Nile Red inspired organoboron dyes for singlet oxygen generation, and circularly polarised luminescence in mechanically interlocked molecules.

Chemical biology and health-facing chemistry are equally present: peptide-targeted fluorescent probes for diagnosis and therapy of brain disorders, label-free photonic biosensors for precision diagnostics, and metallo-organic ligand design translated to peptide-based cages stable in water. Methods and measurement appear in single-particle droplet microfluidics coupled to mass spectrometry for heterogeneous organocatalysis, and in enhanced diboron reagents characterised mechanistically. The journal also publishes substantial reviews — copper(III) chemistry, boron-doped aromatics, luminescent interlocked molecules — which serve as entry points for readers crossing subfields.

For authors, breadth at a flagship works differently from breadth at a generalist mega-journal. The implicit test is significance to chemists beyond the paper's own subfield: a result that a catalysis researcher, a materials chemist and a chemical biologist can each recognise as important. Narrow but excellent specialist work has many homes in the Chemistry Europe portfolio's focused titles; ChemistryEurope asks the additional question of wider resonance, originality and inspiration that its own scope statement names.

Publication model and charges

ChemistryEurope is gold open access: every article is free to read on Wiley Online Library immediately on publication, under open licences, funded on the author side in the standard model. Unusually, the publisher currently waives that cost: Wiley's journal page states that there are currently no article publication charges for publishing open access in ChemistryEurope, with the waiver running to the end of December 2026. The waiver has been extended in stages since launch — earlier announcements ran it to 2025, then into 2026 — as a deliberate launch strategy to build the flagship's author base.

Authors must treat the waiver as time-limited and verify it at submission. A flagship that waives charges while building volume 4 will not necessarily waive them for volume 6, and the authoritative statement is always the current text on the Wiley journal page. Institutional and funder arrangements through Wiley's open access agreements may also apply once standard charges resume. No author should budget on the basis of a directory profile, including this one, when the publisher states the position directly.

Production follows the Wiley pattern: online-first publication, issue assembly with designed front covers and cover features chosen from article artwork, graphical abstracts as a standard article element, and DOI registration through Crossref. The cover culture is a real feature of this journal family — recent issues showcase artwork from catalysis, biomass conversion and dye chemistry papers — and authors with visually striking molecular stories gain a visibility channel that purely textual journals cannot offer.

Indexing, discovery and metrics

The journal is hosted and discovered through Wiley Online Library, registered with Crossref under the 10.1002 prefix, and listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals as an open access title with no publication fee, per the directory-derived summaries of its record. Its articles surface through the ChemistryViews and society channels of the Chemistry Europe network, giving it promotional reach into sixteen national chemical communities that a standalone journal could not buy.

No Journal Impact Factor is quoted in this profile. A journal launched in 2023 accumulates the citation windows on which such metrics rest only gradually, and the figure most often confused with this title — the impact factor of Chemistry — A European Journal — belongs to a different ISSN and a different journal. Directory entries that show no verified metric for ChemistryEurope are reflecting that youth honestly. Authors with funder or institutional requirements tied to specific indexing should verify the journal's current status in Web of Science, Scopus and the Journal Citation Reports directly at decision time, because coverage of a fast-growing flagship changes quickly.

What can be verified now is trajectory: volume 4 in 2026 with monthly-feeling issue flow, a dense stream of articles from leading groups across Europe, North America and Asia, review content already attracting cross-field reading, and a publisher investing in covers, promotion and charge waivers. Those are the signals appropriate to a three-year-old flagship, and they are strong ones.

Relationship to the wider portfolio and author strategy

Authors inside the Chemistry Europe ecosystem face a genuine portfolio choice. A paper of broad significance fits the flagship; a superb specialist paper may travel further in ChemCatChem, ChemSusChem, ChemBioChem or another focused sibling, where its exact community reads daily. Wiley's editorial structure supports transfers within the family, so a manuscript judged too specialised for ChemistryEurope need not leave the ecosystem. The flagship's existence also raises the portfolio's open access profile: alongside ChemistryOpen, the first society-owned fully open access chemistry journal, ChemistryEurope gives the societies a prestige open venue, not only an inclusive one.

Competing for the same manuscripts are other society and commercial flagships across general chemistry. ChemistryEurope's differentiators are society ownership by sixteen European societies, the current charge waiver, Wiley-VCH production and promotion, chief editors of international standing across three continents, and a stated commitment to fast, fair review. Its counterweights are youth, a still-forming citation identity, and the ever-present risk of confusion with its older sibling's name and record.

For readers, the journal functions as a curated cross-section of what European society chemistry currently prizes: catalysis for sustainability, functional molecules and materials, chemistry at the biology interface, and new measurement and synthesis methods, all free to read. A chemist who scans only ChemistryEurope's covers and reviews each month receives a defensible digest of the discipline's moving front.

Strengths, limits and cautions

Strengths: flagship status within a sixteen-society association representing over 75,000 chemists; Wiley-VCH as publisher; gold open access with charges waived until the end of December 2026 per the publisher; internationally recognised chief editors; fast reported first decisions; strong visual and promotional culture; and a contents stream that demonstrably spans the discipline at high level.

Limits: launched only in 2023, so citation history is short and no long-run metric record exists; the name invites persistent confusion with Chemistry — A European Journal, which can misdirect citations, metrics and even submissions; the charge waiver is temporary by design; and flagship breadth means specialist manuscripts compete against cross-disciplinary significance, a harder test than specialist excellence alone.

Caution for cataloguers and evaluators: always resolve this journal by ISSN 2751-4765 or DOI code ceur. If a database shows decades of archive, a 1995 founding, or the ISSN 0947-6539 against the name ChemistryEurope, it has merged two journals, and every metric downstream of that merge is unreliable.

Frequently asked questions

Is ChemistryEurope the same as Chemistry — A European Journal? No. ChemistryEurope, ISSN 2751-4765, launched in 2023 as a gold open access flagship. Chemistry — A European Journal, ISSN 1521-3765 online, dates from 1995. They are siblings in the Chemistry Europe portfolio, not the same journal.

Who owns and publishes it? Chemistry Europe, the association of sixteen European chemical societies, owns the title; Wiley-VCH GmbH in Weinheim publishes it.

Does it charge authors? Currently no: Wiley states article publication charges are waived until the end of December 2026. Recheck the journal page at submission, because the waiver is time-limited.

Who edits it? Wiley lists chief editors Luisa De Cola and Lars C. Grabow, with Anne Nijs as managing editor; Ken Tanaka was part of the founding leadership trio. The live Wiley page carries the current board.

What does it publish? High-significance research and reviews across all areas of chemistry and adjacent disciplines, presented as a central-science flagship, in English, open access.

When did it start? Volume 1 appeared in 2023, following the association's 2022 announcement of the new gold open access flagship.

How the journal presents research: covers, graphical abstracts and visibility

A distinctive feature of the Chemistry Europe flagship family is the investment in visual presentation, and ChemistryEurope carries it fully. Issues are fronted by designed covers drawn from article artwork: a molecular smithy forging push-pull phenazine dyes, an aluminium and phosphorus frustrated Lewis pair drawn as an orchestra conductor, biomass-derived intermediates on a cover about fine chemicals and surfactants, and a combined computation and spectroscopy framework for catalytic C1 chemistry. Cover features are named as such in the issue listings, and authors whose work is selected receive a visibility that citation counts take years to match.

Graphical abstracts are a standard article element, forcing every paper to state its finding as a single legible image and summary. For a broad-audience flagship this is not decoration; it is the mechanism by which a catalysis paper becomes readable to a chemical biologist in the minutes between other tasks. Authors preparing a submission should therefore design their graphical abstract and their cover-worthy figure with the same care as their schemes, because at this journal those elements are part of the scientific communication, not an afterthought added at proof stage.

The surrounding promotional machinery matters too. The Chemistry Europe network channels new content through ChemistryViews, through sixteen national society magazines and newsletters, and through Wiley's own alerting systems. A paper in ChemistryEurope is thus announced repeatedly to the exact national communities — German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Polish and others — whose societies own the journal. For early-career authors building a European collaboration network, that structured visibility is a concrete benefit that a journal's age or metrics do not describe.

Peer review expectations at a broad flagship

Broad scope changes what reviewers are asked to judge. Alongside technical correctness within the subfield, a flagship submission must survive the significance question from readers outside it: is the advance stated in terms a general chemist can grasp, is the supporting information complete enough for specialists to reproduce the work, and are the claims of breadth earned by the data rather than asserted in the introduction? The chief editors' launch statements, with their emphasis on fairness, timeliness and the goal of a high-impact gold open access journal, describe exactly this dual test.

Practical preparation follows from that. Write the abstract and introduction for the whole discipline, keep subfield jargon explained at first use, place exhaustive characterisation and computational detail in complete supporting information, and choose reference lists that acknowledge both the specialist lineage and the neighbouring fields the paper claims to touch. Manuscripts that read as excellent specialist papers with a generalist paragraph pasted on top are the ones breadth-based review exposes; manuscripts conceived from the start as contributions to chemistry at large are the ones the flagship was built to publish.