Tag: food science

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ARPHA expands client journal network to the Middle East

The Emirates Journal of Food and Agriculture (EJFA), a peer-reviewed scholarly outlet in agricultural and food sciences by the College of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine, United Arab Emirates University (UAEU), has now become the first scientific journal from the Middle East to take advantage of the end-to-end scholarly publishing platform ARPHA and its diverse range of services.

Launched in 1989 to cover the areas of agriculture and food science, with a special emphasis on interdisciplinary studies, the open-access scientific journal has already begun publishing its 2024 content on its new ARPHA-powered website. The move comes as a result of a new partnership signed between the United Arab Emirates University and Pensoft: the scholarly publisher and technology innovator.

Since 2013, EJFA is also indexed by Web of Science. Its latest Journal Impact Factor is 1.1, while its Scopus CiteScore reads 1.9.

Launched in 2013, ARPHA is Pensoft’s in-house publishing platform, initially developed by the publisher as an all-round solution for its own journal portfolio. In 2016, ARPHA became available as a white-label solution, thereby allowing client journals to retain their owners as exclusive publishers, and keep their identities intact.

The move to ARPHA ensures a seamless, end-to-end publishing solution for EJFA that encompasses all stages from manuscript submission to article publication, indexation, dissemination, and archiving. The publishing services provided by ARPHA also include a variety of human-provided services and integrations with third-party providers, intended to maximise the reach and usability of scholarly knowledge published in EJFA.

“Together with ARPHA, we can achieve milestones in our journal publishing with ARPHA’s easy-to-use, open-access publishing platform backed with high-end functionalities.”

Abdul Jaleel, Editor-in-Chief of EJFA

EJFA publishes original research articles, review papers and short communications. It welcomes studies from a wide spectrum of agriculture and food disciplines, including sustainable agriculture systems, agricultural biotechnology, environmental impacts, food safety, and food engineering. 

Submissions to EJFA are subject to single-blind peer review. The journal operates a continuous publication model, which means that once accepted, papers go online as soon as they are typeset and ready for publication.

Due to ARPHA Platform’s technologically advanced and automated dissemination, indexing and archiving workflows, as well as its platform-level integrations with >60 leading databases, content published in EJFA is rapidly exported to dozens of platforms and widely used academic search portals, thereby becoming ever easier to discover, access, reuse and cite by audiences from all over the world.

EJFA has already published its first articles since the move. The journal’s backlist content all the way to the inaugural 1989 journal volume can be accessed from a link on the journal’s new website’s homepage. Conveniently, more recent content has been made available from the Articles space.

“It’s an honour to partner with an esteemed institution like the United Arab Emirates University. We are confident that in ARPHA Platform, our new partners will find a great fit for the immaculate professionalism, integrity and overall appeal of the Emirates Journal of Food and Agriculture,” says Pensoft’s CEO and founder Prof. Lyubomir Penev. “Being the first Middle Eastern journal to join ARPHA’s journal portfolio, EJFA has already become a very special client of ours.”

“We are really excited to partner with Pensoft and run the Emirates Journal of Food and Agriculture on the ARPHA platform. This decision by the UAEU will really help the journal to reach the next level with the experience of the Pensoft team and the high-end technology of ARPHA. We believe that this strategic partnership will boost the visibility and accessibility of our journal globally. Together with ARPHA, we can achieve milestones in our journal publishing with ARPHA’s easy-to-use, open-access publishing platform backed with high-end functionalities,” says EJFA’s Editor-in-Chief, Abdul Jaleel.

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Food Modelling Journal: New open-access venue provides a platform for food scientists

An introductory editorial and an article of a unique publication type are already made available in the next-generation journal

The open-access Food Modelling Journal (FMJ) was launched by the AGINFRA+ community and Pensoft with the aim to encourage food science specialists, agronomists and computer scientists to come together and work on assuring and improving food supply, quality and safety in our globalised and rapidly changing world.

The Food Modelling Journal will be focusing on the publication of information objects and digital resources in the food science field, related (but not limited) to: food safety, food quality, food control, food defence and food design, documenting experimental or observational data and mathematical models.

By providing a platform and tools for describing scientific records and crediting for dedicated models, data, data analytics workflows and software, FMJ fosters the overall reproducibility and reusability of research.

FMJ also aims to shed light on what we refer to as research objects – data, software scripts, visualisation routines or models. Usually, they would stay undervalued, underused and uncredited, despite their importance for the scientific progress.

The focus and scope of the journal are supported by a number of specific key features:

  • Quality but not quantity
  • Cross-disciplinary approach
  • Open data and software code policy
  • Rapid turnaround time
  • Advanced open access and machine-readability.

It should be noted that the Open Science movement and the barrier-free access to research, is at the heart of the FMJ project.

To support its authors, the AGINFRA+ community, Pensoft and Food Modelling Journal have provided them access to the ARPHA Writing Tool, where researchers are able to work together with their co-authors, colleagues and peers on manuscripts from the drafting stage to publication.

A FSKX model run using the executable paper feature available in Food Modelling Journal.

A particularly appealing feature, meant to promote reproducibility, collaboration and openness in science, is the executable papers, where users can reproduce research findings using the published model and running it either with default or new parameters. By clicking an “Execute” button within the body of the article, users are taken to an external virtual environment where they will be able to execute the computation. By ‘encapsulating’ all the details needed to perform the action within the paper, this feature ensures that the published findings will remain testifiable in the future.

“While the long-lasting tradition in science used to focus on crediting researchers’ work through conventional research articles and especially by counting their citations, many exciting, useful and often invaluable products of the research cycle, such as data, software scripts, visualisation routines or models (usually called “research objects”) normally stay undervalued, underused and uncredited, despite their importance for scientific progress,” note the editorial board in the introductory editorial.

“The consequences of this neglect of the initial and intermediate steps of the research cycle in favour of the research articles or research books are obvious: scientists often repeat efforts done by others instead of using these as a stepping stone for further analyses and generating new knowledge, let alone the impossible or restricted reproducibility and reusability of research results,” they add.

The first paper of a unique publication type: FSKX (Food Safety Knowledge), is already publicly accessible in the journal. Classified as an early research outcome, the article presents a new generic model for assessing the risk of salmonellosis associated with the consumption of table eggs. To ensure the reusability of the model, the research team of Virginie Desvignes (ANSES – French Food Safety Agency) have made it available in the Food Safety Knowledge Markup Language (FSK-ML) format alongside the executable model script, visualisation script and simulation settings.

FSK-ML is an open information exchange format that is based on harmonised terms, metadata and controlled vocabulary to harmonise annotations of risk assessment models and that was significantly improved and extended during the AGINFRA+ project.

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Food Modelling Journal is indexed by BASE, CNKI, CrossRef, Dimensions, Google Scholar, J-Gate, Mendeley, Microsoft Academic, Naviga (Softweco), OCLC WorldCat, OpenAIRE, OpenCitations, ReadCube, Transpose, Ulrichsweb™ and Unpaywall; and archived at CLOCKSS, Zenodo and Portico.