Information For Authors

JAFSCD is the world's only peer-reviewed, transdisciplinary journal focused solely on food and farming-related community development. JAFSCD uses a double-blind peer-review process, with expert reviewers who include researchers, scholars, and food systems professionals in the field. Each accepted article is published online immediately after copy-editing and formatting, and then is aggregated into a quarterly issue for indexing purposes.

As of January 1, 2018, JAFSCD became open access! We are funding our work using an innovative model borrowed from the food system, as the world's first community-supported journal. See the list of JAFSCD's Library Shareholders and University & College Program and Nonprofit Shareholders. We welcome your institution's support—learn how at our publisher website. Authors at shareholding institutions have the US$750 APC waived (see below).

JAFSCD is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the authoritative list of high-quality, genuinely peer-reviewed open access journals.

We are indexed in databases from CABI, EBSCOhost, ProQuest, Web of Science, the U.S. National Agriculture Library's AGRICOLA database, and CNKI (one of China's largest A&I databases—forthcoming). See the current list.

Interested in submitting to JAFSCD?

We do not accept unsolicited submissions, but we respond promptly to inquiries and/or query forms. We do not charge a submission fee. We recommend that you carefully review the About the Journal page for the journal's submission policies, as well as the Author Guidelines. Also read about Types of Manuscripts we accept, including word counts and other guidance. Then complete the JAFSCD Query Form in SurveyMonkey. Your query will be reviewed by editor in chief Duncan Hilchey. If your manuscript is approved for peer review, we'll send you instructions for uploading it to our editorial management system.

As an open access journal, we publish content under the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license. We also require authors to deposit their full papers as published into their institutional repository. While article pageviews and PDF download statistics are not publicly available at this time, we're happy to provide a report upon request.

Calls for papers

See our current call for papers and see the PDF of the full announcement (great for posting and sharing!). In addition, we accept papers on any topic related to food systems throughout the year with no specific deadlines.

Article Processing Charge

Our article processing charge (APC) is US$750. If your institution is a shareholder, the fee is automatically waived. Check the list of JAFSCD's Library Shareholders and University and College Program and Nonprofit Shareholders to see if your library or program is listed. 

If you do not have resources to support publication, you can request a waiver—we do not intend to discourage submissions due to lack of resources. Book reviewers and authors of commentaries are not charged the APC.

You'll be asked about the APC and whether you'd like to request a waiver as you complete the JAFSCD Query Form.

Interested in suggesting or reviewing a book?

We're happy to take suggestions for books (or movies or other materials) to be reviewed, or to take proposals to review books mentioned in our Article Heads-up emails. Book reviewers are not charged an article processing charge (APC). To offer to review an item, please complete our online Book Review Query form.