Food and Feed Research

The journal Food and Feed Research publishes original papers that have not been published previously (peer-reviewed original articles, short communications, case reports, review articles). Food and Feed Research is an Open Access journal. The following is a partial list of the nature of articles appropriate for submission to the journal for review and publication consideration:

• Raw and processed food/feed materials: Quality, structure, physical properties.
• Food/feed technology: Development, production and processing of food and feed. Food/feed engineering. Characterisation of food/feed ingredients and final products.
• Biotechnology: Application of biotechnology to plants, animals and microorganisms related to food/feed production and processing, and fermentation technology.
• Functional, and traditional food, as well as food with geographical origin
• Nutrition and health: Human and animal nutrition. Enhancing health and wellness with novel and functional foods/feeds nutraceuticals, (but not pharmaceuticals) or food/feed supplementation. Evaluation of feed, including chemical methods, animal models and in vivo / in vitro testing systems.
• Food and feed safety: Microbiological food/feed safety, including novel processes and packaging. Risk assessment and risk management techniques.
• Sensory and consumer sciences: Perception and evaluation of characteristics of foods and beverages including flavour, appearance, labelling and texture. Consumer behaviour issues, including acceptability, preference and other factors related to cultural and marketing issues as well as product image.
• Analytical techniques and methods in food and feed research
• Food/feed quality assurance and environmental issues

EDITORIAL POLICY

Editorial Responsibilities

The Editor-in-Chief is responsible for deciding which articles submitted to Food and Feed Research will be published. The Editor-in-Chief/Editor is guided by the Editorial Policy and constrained by legal requirements in force regarding libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism.

The Editor-in-Chief reserves the right to decide not to publish submitted manuscripts in case it is found that they do not meet relevant standards concerning the content and formal aspects.

Editor-in-Chief/Editor must hold no conflict of interest with regard to the articles they consider for publication. If an Editor feels that there is likely to be a perception of a conflict of interest in relation to their handling of a submission, the selection of reviewers and all decisions on the paper shall be made by the Editorial Stuff under the condition that the member(s) holding a conflict of interest are withdrawn from the selection.

Editor-in-Chief/Editor shall evaluate manuscripts for their intellectual content free from any racial, gender, sexual, religious, ethnic, or political bias.

The Editor and the Editorial Staff must not use unpublished materials disclosed in submitted manuscripts without the express written consent of the authors. The information and ideas presented in submitted manuscripts shall be kept confidential and must not be used for personal gain.

Editors and the Editorial Staff shall take all reasonable measures to ensure that the reviewers remain anonymous to the authors before, during and after the evaluation process.

 

Authors’ responsibilities

Authors warrant that their manuscript is their original work, that it has not been published before and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. Parallel submission of the same paper to another journal constitutes misconduct and eliminates the manuscript from consideration by Food and Feed Research.

Papers previously reported at a congress, symposium, workshop etc. will be also considered for publishing (under the same or different title) if they have not been published in proceedings as full papers. A paper that has already been published in another journal cannot be reprinted in Food and Feed Research.

It is the responsibility of each author to ensure that papers submitted to Food and Feed Research are written with ethical standards in mind. Authors affirm that the article contains no unfounded or unlawful statements and does not violate the rights of third parties. The Publisher will not be held legally responsible should there be any claims for compensation.

Reporting standards

A submitted manuscript should contain sufficient detail and references to permit reviewers and, subsequently, readers to verify the claims presented in it. The deliberate presentation of false claims is a violation of ethical standards.

Authors are exclusively responsible for the contents of their submissions and must make sure that they have permission from all involved parties to make the data public.  

Authors wishing to include figures, tables or other materials that have already been published elsewhere are required to obtain permission from the copyright holder(s). Any material received without such evidence will be assumed to originate from the authors.

Authorship

Authors must make sure that all only contributors who have significantly contributed to the submission are listed as authors and, conversely, that all contributors who have significantly contributed to the submission are listed as authors. If persons other than authors were involved in important aspects of the research project and the preparation of the manuscript, their contribution should be acknowledged in a footnote or the Acknowledgments section.

Plagiarism

By submitting a manuscript to Food and Feed Research, the authors confirm that the manuscript does not contain plagiarized and self-plagiarized content.

Acknowledgement of Sources

Authors are required to properly cite sources that have significantly influenced their research and their manuscript. Information received in a private conversation or correspondence with third parties, in reviewing project applications, manuscripts and similar materials must not be used without the express written consent of the information source.

Full references of each quotation (in-text citation) must be listed in the separate section (Literature or References) in a uniform manner, according to the citation style used by the journal. References section should list only quoted/cited, and not all sources used for the preparation of a manuscript.

Conflict of interest

Authors should disclose in their manuscript any financial or other substantive conflict of interest that might have influenced the presented results or their interpretation.

Fundamental errors in published works

When an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in his/her own published work, it is the author’s obligation to promptly notify the journal Editor or publisher and cooperate with the Editor to retract or correct the paper.

By submitting a manuscript the authors agree to abide by the Food and Feed Research’s Editorial Policies.

 

Reviewers’ responsibilities

Reviewers are required to provide written, competent and unbiased feedback in a timely manner on the scholarly merits and the scientific value of the manuscript.

The reviewers assess manuscript for the compliance with the profile of the journal, the relevance of the investigated topic and applied methods, the originality and scientific relevance of information presented in the manuscript, the presentation style and scholarly apparatus.

Reviewers should alert the Editor to any well-founded suspicions or the knowledge of possible violations of ethical standards by the authors. Reviewers should recognize relevant published works that have not been cited by the authors and alert the Editor to substantial similarities between a reviewed manuscript and any manuscript published or under consideration for publication elsewhere, in the event, they are aware of such. Reviewers should also alert the Editor to a parallel submission of the same paper to another journal, in the event they are aware of such.

Reviewers must not have a conflict of interest with respect to the research, the authors and/or the funding sources for the research. If such conflicts exist, the reviewers must report them to the Editor without delay.

Any selected referee who feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript or knows that its prompt review will be impossible should notify the Editor without delay.

Reviews must be conducted objectively. Personal criticism of the author is inappropriate. Reviewers should express their views clearly with supporting arguments.

Any manuscripts received for review must be treated as confidential documents. Reviewers must not use unpublished materials disclosed in submitted manuscripts without the express written consent of the authors. The information and ideas presented in submitted manuscripts shall be kept confidential and must not be used for personal gain.

 

REVIEWING PROCEDURE

Peer review

Once a manuscript is submitted, the Editor-in-Chief will evaluate it on scope, presentation, academic, and language quality grounds. Manuscripts may be sent back to the author for technical revision or declined if the work is outside the journal’s scope or does not meet the required standard.

Under normal circumstances, the review process takes up to 6 weeks, and only exceptionally up to three months. The total period from the submission of a manuscript until its publication takes an average of 90 days.

In the main review phase, the Editor sends submitted papers to at least 2 experts in the field. The reviewers’ evaluation form contains a checklist in order to help referees cover all aspects that can decide the fate of a submission. In the final section of the evaluation form, the reviewers must include observations and suggestions aimed at improving the submitted manuscript; these are sent to authors, without the names of the reviewers.

All of the reviewers of a paper act independently and they are not aware of each other’s identities. All of the reviewers of a manuscript remain anonymous to the authors before, during and after the evaluation process. If the decisions of the two reviewers are not the same (accept/reject), the Editor may assign additional reviewers.

During the review process, Editor may require authors to provide additional information (including raw data) if they are necessary for the evaluation of the scholarly merit of the manuscript. These materials shall be kept confidential and must not be used for personal gain.

The authors are expected to revise their manuscript, fully addressing each and every single reviewer’s comments either by making appropriate revision or stating why the comments are unreasonable. A letter of response should be submitted with the manuscript justifying the changes made. The Editor/Editor-in-Chief will evaluate the revision and make a recommendation i.e. decision. The authors will then be informed by the Editor-in-Chief of the final decision.

Peer reviewers

The integrity of the peer-review process is upheld through the use of single-blind review i.e. the identity of the reviewers is not disclosed to the author. Each manuscript is reviewed by at least two reviewers. The reviewers are selected solely according to whether they have the relevant expertise for evaluating a manuscript.

The authors may submit with their manuscript, the names, affiliations and contact details of two to three potential referees in the article’s area of study; however, the choice of reviewers is at the discretion of Editor-in-Chief. Ideally, these reviewers should not be from the same institution as the authors, nor should they be their co-authors in the recent past. The following checks are applied to reviewers:

• that they hold a PhD (rarely, exceptions may be made in some fields);
• that they have publications in the field of the submitted papers.

The submitted manuscripts are subject to a peer-review process. The purpose of peer review is to assist the Editor-in-Chief in making editorial decisions and through the editorial communications with the author it may also assist the author in improving the paper.

Resolving inconsistencies

In the case that the authors have serious and reasonable objections to the reviews, the Editorial Board makes an assessment of whether a review is objective and whether it meets academic standards. If there is a doubt about the objectivity or quality of the review, the Editor-in-Chief will assign additional reviewer(s).

Additional reviewers may also be assigned when reviewers’ decisions (accept or reject) are contrary to each other or otherwise substantially incompatible.

The final decision on the acceptance of the manuscript for publication rests solely with the Editor-in-Chief.

Procedures for dealing with unethical behaviour

 Anyone may inform the editors and/or Editorial Staff at any time of suspected unethical behaviour or any type of misconduct by giving the necessary information/evidence to start an investigation.

Investigation

• Editor-in-Chief will consult with the Editorial Board on decisions regarding the initiation of an investigation.
• During an investigation, any evidence should be treated as strictly confidential and only made available to those strictly involved in investigating.
• The accused will always be given the chance to respond to any charges made against them.
• If it is judged at the end of the investigation that misconduct has occurred, then it will be classified as either minor or serious.

Minor misconduct

Minor misconduct will be dealt with directly with those involved without involving any other parties, e.g.:

• Communicating to authors/reviewers whenever a minor issue involving misunderstanding or misapplication of academic standards has occurred.
• A warning letter to an author or reviewer regarding fairly minor misconduct.
• Publishing correction of a paper, e.g. when sources properly quoted in the text are omitted from the reference list.
• Publishing an erratum, e.g. if the error was made by editorial staff.

Major misconduct

The Editor-in-Chief in consultation with the Editorial Board, and, when appropriate, further consultation with a small group of experts should make any decision regarding the course of action to be taken using the evidence available. The possible outcomes are as follows (these can be used separately or jointly):

• Publication of a formal announcement or editorial describing the misconduct.
• Informing the author's (or reviewer's) head of department or employer of any misconduct by means of a formal letter.
• The formally announced retraction of publications from the journal in accordance with the Retraction Policy (see below).
• A ban on submissions from an individual for a defined period.
• Referring a case to a professional organization or legal authority for further investigation and action.

When dealing with unethical behaviour, the Editorial Staff will rely on the guidelines and recommendations provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE): http://publicationethics.org/resources/.

 

PLAGIARISM PREVENTION

 The journal's Editorial Board has adopted the stance that plagiarism, where someone assumes another's ideas, words, or other creative expressions as one's own, is a clear violation of scientific ethics. Plagiarism may also involve a violation of copyright law, punishable by legal action.

Plagiarism includes the following:

• verbatim (word for word), or almost verbatim copying, or purposely paraphrasing portions of another author's work without clearly indicating the source or marking the copied fragment (for example, using quotation marks) in a way described under authors’ responsibilities;
• copying equations, figures or tables from someone else's paper without properly citing the source and/or without permission from the original author or the copyright holder.

Any manuscript which shows obvious signs of plagiarism will be automatically rejected. In case plagiarism is discovered in a paper that has already been published by the journal, it will be retracted in accordance with the procedure described under retraction policy.

Articles published in Food and Feed Research are screened for plagiarism before peer-review by means of iThenticateÒ by the Centre for Evaluation in Education and Science (Serbia).

 

Retraction Policy

Legal limitations of the publisher, copyright holder or author(s), infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submissions, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or any major misconduct require retraction of an article.

Occasionally a retraction can be used to correct numerous serious errors, which cannot be covered by publishing corrections. A retraction may be published by the Editor-in-Chief / Editorial Board, the author(s), or both parties consensually.

The retraction takes the form of a separate item listed in the contents and labelled as "Retraction". In SCIndeks, as the journals' primary full-text database, a two-way communication (HTML link) between the original work and the retraction is established. The original article is retained unchanged, except for a watermark on the PDF indicating on each page that it is “retracted”.

Retractions are published according to the requirements of COPE operationalized by CEON/CEES as the journal indexer and aggregator. Legal limitations of the publisher, copyright holder or author(s), infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submissions, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or any major misconduct require retraction of an article.

 

Open Access Policy

 The journal Food and Feed Research is published under an Open Access licence. All its content is available free of charge. Users can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search the full text of articles, as well as establish HTML links to them, without having to seek the consent of the author or publisher.

The right to use content without consent does not release the users from the obligation to give the credit to the journal and its content in a manner described under Licensing.

 

ARCHIVING DIGITAL VERSIONS

In accordance with the law, digital copies of all published volumes are archived in the legal deposit library of the National Library of Serbia and Matica srpska and concurrently in the Repository of SCIndeks - The Serbian Citation Index as the primary full-text database.

 

ARTICLE PROCESSING CHARGE

The journal Food and Feed Research does not charge authors or any third party for publication. Both manuscript submission and processing services, and article publishing services are free of charge. There are no hidden costs whatsoever.  

 

COPYRIGHT

Authors retain the copyright of the published papers and grant to the publisher the non-exclusive right to publish the article, to be cited as its original publisher in case of reuse, and to distribute it in all forms and media.

 

LICENSE

The published material will be distributed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 International License (CC BY). It is allowed to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and remix, transform and build upon it for any purpose, even commercially, as long as appropriate credit is given to the original author(s), a link to the license is provided and it is indicated if changes were made.

Users are required to provide a full bibliographic description of the original publication (authors, article title, journal title, volume, issue, pages), as well as its DOI code. In electronic publishing, users are also required to link the content with both the original article published in Food and Feed Research and the license used.

Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.

 

SELF-ARCHIVING POLICY

 Authors are permitted to deposit publisher's version (PDF) of their work in an institutional repository, subject-based repository, author's personal website (including social networking sites, such as ResearchGate, Academia.edu, etc.), and/or departmental website at any time after publication.

Full bibliographic information (authors, article title, journal title, volume, issue, pages) about the original publication must be provided and links must be made to the article's DOI and the license.

 

DISLAIMER

The views expressed in the published works do not express the views of the editors and Editorial Staff. The authors take legal and moral responsibility for the ideas expressed in the articles. Publisher shall have no liability in the event of issuance of any claims for damages. The Publisher will not be held legally responsible should there be any claims for compensation.

 

PRIVACY STATEMENT

 The names and email addresses entered in this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.