Announcements

We are pleased to announce that the following researchers have joined the Editorial Board of Foods.

• Prof. Dr. Andreas L. Lopata
  Molecular Allergy Research Laboratory, College of Public Health, Medical and Veterinary Sciences, Australian Institute of Tropical Health & Medicine, James Cook University, Douglas, QLD 4811, Australia
  Interests: tropomyosin; shellfish; shrimp; mollusc; food allergy; parvalbumin; fish allergy; IgE antibody; food allergen; seafood

• Prof. Dr. Monique Lacroix
  INRS—Armand-Frappier, Health & Biotechnology Centre, INRS, Laval City, QC, Canada
  Interests: irradiation; food safety; nutrition; polyphenols; probiotics; bio-based packaging; active edible coating and packaging

• Prof. Dr. Giuseppina Marilia Tantillo
  Department of Veterinary Medicine, University of Bari "Aldo Moro", Bari, Italy
  Interests: food safety; food hygiene; food microbiology; chemical risk in foods; commercial fraud

• Prof. Dr. Hanne Christine Bertram
  Department of Food Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
  Interests: foodomics; metabolomics; nuclear magnetic resonance; nutrition; endogenous metabolism; gut health; functional ingredients; animal-based foods; dietary protein; meat science; water mobility; NMR relaxometry

We wish them every success in their new positions.

Further details concerning the Editorial Board can be found here:

https://www.mdpi.com/journal/foods/editors.

The COVID-19 pandemic has aroused the interest of researchers and the general public in viruses, including food researchers. This is an excellent opportunity to increase our knowledge about viruses and the ways for understanding the effects of COVID-19 on human health related to food. Thus, the editors shared some papers and Special Issues to invite you to participate and follow up on the new publications!

Published Papers: https://www.mdpi.com/search?q=COVID-19+&journal=foods

Special Issues:

• Viruses in Food
  Guest Editors: Prof. Vicente M. Gómez-López and Prof. Julie Jean
• Natural Products and Bioactive Compounds to Help in the Fight against the COVID-19 Pandemic
  Guest Editors: Dr. Luís Manuel Lopes Rodrigues da Silva and Dr. Gilberto Alves
• Advancing Healthy Food Environments for Sustainable Diets in a Changing World
  Guest Editors: Prof. Selena Ahmed and Prof. Shauna Downs
• Effects and Implications of COVID-19 for the Human Senses, Consumer Preferences, Appetite and Eating Behaviour
  Guest Editor: Prof. Dr. Derek V. Byrne
• The Food Safety Risk Perceptions of Consumers during the COVID-19 Pandemic
  Guest Editor: Prof. Dr. Sylvain Charlebois

At MDPI, we strive to make your online publication process seamless and efficient. To achieve this, our team is continuously developing tools and features to make the user experience useful and convenient.

As the number of academic papers continues to grow, so does the need to analyze and work with them on a large scale. This prompted us to design a new feature aimed at helping researchers find journals that are relevant to their publication by matching their abstract topic. In this regard, we designed a similarity model that automatically identifies the most suitable academic journals for your paper.

We are pleased to introduce Journal Selector, a new feature that measures similarity in academic contexts. By simply entering the title and/or abstract into our Journal Selector, the author will see a list of the most related scientific journals published by MDPI. This method helps authors select the correct journals for their papers, highlighting the time of publication and citability.

The methodology is known as representation learning, where words are represented as vectors in hyperspace. Representation helps us differentiate between different concepts within articles, and in turn, helps us identify similarities between them.

We used an advanced machine learning model to better capture the semantic meanings of words. This helps the algorithm make better predictions by leveraging scientific text representation. In turn, this ensures high precision, helping authors decide which journal they should submit their paper to.

The goal is to support authors to publish their work in the most suitable journal for their research, as fast as possible, accelerating their career progress.

Contact: Andrea Perlato, Head of Data Analytics, MDPI (email)

We are pleased to announce that eight academic editors who have made an impact on the journal Foods through their remarkable contributions as editorial board members are being recognized as 2020 Highly Cited Researchers by Clarivate. This corresponds to being in the top 1% of the most cited researchers for that publication year.

Prof. Dr. Colm O'Donnell
University College Dublin, Ireland

Prof. Dr. Daniel Granato
Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke), Finland

Dr. Declan J. Bolton
Teagasc Food Research Centre, Ireland

Dr. Didier Dupont
INRAE, L'Institut Agro, France

Prof. Dr. Eric A. Decker
University of Massachusetts, USA

Dr. Francisco J. Barba
Universitat de València, Spain

Dr. Isidra Recio
Instituto de Investigación en Ciencias de la Alimentación (CIAL, CSIC-UAM), Spain

Prof. Dr. Jose Angel Perez-Alvarez.
Universidad Miguel Hernandez de Elche, Spain

MDPI is proud to adopt the principles of the Coalition for Diversity & Inclusion in Scholarly Communications (C4DISC) to support building equity, inclusion, diversity, and accessibility in scholarly communications.

The C4DISC represents organizations and individuals working in scholarly communications and is focused on addressing issues of diversity and inclusion within the publishing industry.

MDPI’s Managing Editors encourage the Editors-in-Chief and Associate Editors to appoint diverse expert Editorial Boards. This is also reflective in our multi-national and inclusive workplace. We are proud to create equal opportunities without regard to gender, ethnicity, geographic location, sexual orientation, age, disability, political beliefs, religion, or socio-economic status. There is no place for discrimination in our workplace and editors of MDPI journals are to uphold these principles in high regard.

Representatives from C4DISC meet monthly, and have started to implement initiatives to shed light and improve on the lack of diversity in scholarly communications. Some of the initiatives include developing a joint statement of principles; conducting market research; providing training resources, best practices, toolkits, and documentation for our collective memberships; and establishing outreach programs, curricula, events, and publications.

The Coalition is committed to:

• eliminating barriers to participation, extending equitable opportunities across all stakeholders, and ensuring that our practices and policies promote equitable treatment and do not allow, condone, or result in discrimination;
• creating and maintaining an environment that respects diverse traditions, heritages, and experiences;
• promoting diversity in all staff, volunteers, and audiences, including full participation in programs, policy formulation, and decision-making;
• raising awareness about career opportunities in our industries to groups who are currently underrepresented in the workforce;
• supporting our members in achieving diversity and inclusion within their organizations.

At MDPI we have slightly revised the layout for articles to be published in the 2021 Volume, starting at the end of December 2020. As of today, the article templates available for download on ‘Instructions for Authors’ pages have been updated.

The most noticeable change can be found on the first page of the article, where a left-hand column has been created to include the following front matter elements: (i) the recommended citation style for the article, (ii) the publishing history, (iii) as well as the Creative Commons Attribution license used (iv) a standard note regarding affiliations. At the same time, the extra spacing on the left means the authors’ affiliations are now more clearly set apart than before. Other front matter key elements such as journal logo, article type, article title, authors, abstract and keywords remain unchanged.

The blank column on the left runs through all pages in an article; as a result, the main text is slightly more condensed, which improve reader friendliness for smaller screens. Small figures/tables are aligned on the left with standard indenture, while large figures/tables are centered and covering the full width of the page. The revised layout was applied in the article pictured below, to serve as an example:

1) Information is displayed in the left information bar.

2) In the main text, there is a blank column on the left.

3) Small tables/figures are aligned on the left, large tables/figures are centered.

We are pleased to acknowledge that many academic editors who have made an impact on MDPI journals as editorial board members, editors-in-chief, or section editors, are recognized as 2020 Highly Cited Researchers by Clarivate.

Highly Cited Researchers highlights the top 1% of researchers, by citations, in one or more of the 22 fields used in Clarivate Analytics Essential Science Indicators. We offer our congratulations to 279 academic editors of MDPI journals who were recognized as the most influential scholars in their fields in 2020.

The full list of 2020 Highly Cited Researchers  can be accessed on https://recognition.webofsciencegroup.com/awards/highly-cited/2020/

--- Highly Cited Researchers (HCR) is a Clarivate product.

We are pleased to announce that the following researchers have joined the Editorial Board of Foods.

Prof. Dr. Eric A. Decker

Department of Food Science, University of Massachusetts, Chenoweth Laboratory, Amherst, MA 01003, USA
Interests: functional and nutritional aspects of lipids; lipid oxidation; antioxidants and chelators

Prof. Dr. Annamaria Ranieri

Department of Agriculture, Food and Environment, University of Pisa, Via del Borghetto 80, 56124 Pisa, Italy
Interests: agro industrial by-product; plant food shelf-life; nutraceuticals

Prof. Dr. Shinichi Kitamura

Laboratory of Advanced Food Process Engineering Organization for Research Promotion, Osaka Prefecture University, 1-2, Gakuen-cho, Naka-ku, Sakai, 599-8570, Japan

Interests: carbohydrates and lipids; global analyses of foods components, gene expression profiling of sugar and lipid metabolism; enzymatic syntheses of new functional carbohydrates and lipids; nanotechnology using carbohydrates and lipids; biological activities of carbohydrates and lipids

We wish them every success in their new positions.

Further details concerning the Editorial Board can be found here.

For Recruiting Editors:

In order to better categorize papers published within the journal, Foods is looking to expand its Editorial Board in order to cover areas that need additional representation by the current team. If you are interested in serving as an Academic Editor on the Editorial Board or would like to recommend potential candidates, please reach out to us.

The main responsibilities and benefits of Editorial Board Members are as follows:

1. Prescreen submissions and make decisions on whether they should be rejected or accepted for processing, and suggest additional reviewers if necessary;
2. Review a couple of manuscripts per year;
3. Lead at least one Special Issue in your particular field of expertise every two years;
4. Suggest some interesting topics for the journal;
5. You may publish open-access papers with discounts;
6. All Editorial Board Members have the chance to obtain sponsorship for the conferences that they organize or attend.

For Recruiting Reviewers:

We would like to invite you to join the Reviewer Board (RB) of Foods (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/foods)

We will extend the following benefits to reviewers:

1. The Foods Editorial Board will acknowledge all Reviewer members in its annual reviewer list through a publication/announcement in the "Acknowledgement to Reviewers of Foods" editorial on the journal website;
2. Reviewer members who provide timely, thorough, and rigorous peer-review reports will receive a voucher that can be applied to their next publications in MDPI journals;
3. The Board will present special recognition certificates to “Exceptional Reviewer Board Members” to thank them for their outstanding reviewing work;
4. Reviewer members may be presented with the possibility to join the Editorial Board of the journal (subject to the approval of the Editor-in-Chief).

To apply or request further information, please contact the Foods Editorial Office (foods@mdpi.com). We look forward to hearing from you soon.

We are delighted to announce the establishment of our Open Access agreement with Jisc Collections, which will allow UK institutions to benefit from access to article processing charge (APC) discounts and streamlined payment workflows.

All institutions participating in the agreement will also gain access to the MDPI online submission system where they can find full article metadata and pricing information for easy identification and additional transparency.

Eligible authors affiliated with the participating institutions are prompted to choose the corresponding Institutional Open Access Program (IOAP) when they submit an article via our online submission system.

About Jisc

Jisc's vision is for the UK to be the most digitally advanced education and research nation in the world. At its heart is the super-fast national research and education network, Janet, with built-in cyber security protection.  Jisc also provides technology solutions for its members (colleges, universities and research centres) and customers (public sector bodies), helps members save time and money by negotiating sector-wide deals and provides advice and practical assistance on digital technology. Jisc is funded by the UK higher and further education and research funding bodies and member institutions.

For more information, contact helen.dobson@jisc.ac.uk.

About MDPI

MDPI is a publisher of fully peer-reviewed, Open Access journals with a focus on thorough and rapid editorial processing. Its aim is to ensure that high-quality research is verified and made available to the research community as quickly as possible. MDPI stands at the forefront of the Open Access movement, having launched its first online journal Molecules in 1996. Today, MDPI is a leader in Open Access publishing with over 250 journals across all research disciplines, and all content published under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).

For any questions about this agreement, please contact the MDPI IOAP team at ioap@mdpi.com.