JOURNAL TOOLSThe 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paper shall be made by the Editorial staff under the condition that the member(s) holding a conflict of interest are withdrawn from the selection.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The Editor and the Editorial Staff must not use unpublished materials disclosed in submitted manuscripts without the express written consent of the authors.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 that 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.
Authors are also exclusively responsible for the contents of their data/supplementary files. Authors affirm that data protection regulations, ethical standards, third party copyright and other rights have been respected in the process of collecting, processing and sharing data.
Authorship
Authors must make sure 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.
Author contributions
For transparency, authors are encouraged to submit an author statement outlining their individual contributions to the paper. The relevant CRediT roles are: Conceptualization; Data curation; Formal analysis; Funding acquisition; Investigation; Methodology, Project administration; Resources, Software; Supervision; Validation; Visualisation; Writing—original draft preparation; Writing—review and editing. For more information, refer to the contributor roles taxonomy (https://credit.niso.org/). Contribution statements should be formatted with CRediT(s) roles first and name of authors (initials) following.
Note that not all roles may apply to every manuscript, and authors may have contributed through multiple roles.
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) uniformly, 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.
When citing or making claims based on data, authors should provide the reference to data in the same way as they cite publications. We recommend the format proposed by the FORCE11 Data Citation Principles.
Conflict of interest
Authors should disclose in their manuscript any financial or other substantive conflicts 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 process
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 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 the retraction policy.
Articles published in Food and Feed Research are screened for plagiarism before peer review utilizing iThenticateâ 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.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST
Food and Feed Research adheres to the conflict of interest policy recommended by COPE and/or other international research publishing regulatory authorities (ICMJE, EASE). The authors must declare their conflicts of interest in the Conflict of Interest Statement (CoIS). In the CoIS, each named author of the article is required to provide: (1) A statement of any potential conflicts of interest relevant to the content or a statement that there are no such conflicts. (2) Disclosure of how the article is funded, including specific disclosure of any and all company funding (partial or total), or a statement that there was no such involvement (if applicable). (3) A comprehensive explanation of the role of sponsors in article preparation if the article is sponsored in part or whole.
The authors should disclose any financial or non-financial competing interests or state “The authors declare no conflict of interest”. Authors must identify and declare any personal circumstances or interest that may be perceived as inappropriately influencing the representation or interpretation of reported research results. Any role of the funders in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results must be declared in this section. If there is no role, please state “The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results”. Examples of financial interests may include employment/voluntary involvement; grants to the authors/organization; personal fees, intellectual property; benefits related to product development, etc. Non-financial competing interests may include gifts (equipment, tools, software, drugs); access to data repositories; holding a position on boards; close relationships with journal editors; academic competing interests, etc.
INFORMED CONSENT POLICY
Authors of papers published in Food and Feed Research are obliged to demonstrate that they handle the information of individuals participating in their studies with the highest levels of confidence and discretion. Therefore, authors must obtain written informed consent from all patients involved in the study. However, a study may be published without explicit consent if all three of the following conditions are fulfilled: the information is of great significance to public health, obtaining consent would be unusually difficult, and a reasonable individual would be unlikely to object to publication.
ETHICS IN RESEARCH
Human and animal rights
In articles reporting experiments on human subjects, authors should indicate whether the procedures followed the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and complied with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2013.
For articles reporting experimental research on animals, authors should indicate whether the procedures comply with national or international guidelines. Where available, the procedures should have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee. A statement in accordance with relevant guidelines (Directive 2010/63/EU in Europe) and/or ethical approval must be submitted with the manuscript. Studies must include accepted norms of veterinary best practice regarding animal sacrifice.
Sensory evaluation is a specific case in research ethics and requires an ethical statement because it involves human subjects as trained or naive panellists, and consumers in sensory-consumer studies. If ethical approval is not required by national laws, authors must either provide an exemption from ethics committee (with the name of the ethics committee and relevant reference number) or, if no human ethics committee or formal documentation process is available, the statement should explain this and confirm that the appropriate protocols for protecting the rights and privacy of all participants were utilized during the execution of the research, e.g. no coercion to participate, full disclosure of study requirements and risks, written or verbal consent of participants, no release of participant data without their knowledge, ability to withdraw from the study at any time. If vulnerable populations (e.g. children, individuals with diminished physical or intellectual capacity, the socially or economically vulnerable or institutionalized individuals) are used in the research, evidence of permission for them to participate from parents or guardians must be obtained. Publication of photographs that reveal a participant's identity must be accompanied by a release signed by the participant.
For non-interventional studies (e.g., surveys, questionnaires, social media research), all participants must be fully informed about the reasons for the research is being conducted, data anonymity assurance, how their data will be used, and if there are any risks associated with it. Some cases (for example social media research, etc.) might not require full disclosure, e.g. if de-identified data are obtained or if subject blinding to the manipulation or the purpose of the study is required. In the latter case, such details should be explained in the Ethical Statement and de-briefing of participants should be conducted. All relevant privacy protections related to disclosure of subject identities must be strictly maintained.
Editors reserve the right to reject any submission that does not meet the above requirements.
OPEN ACCESS POLICY
The journal Food and Feed Research is published under an Open Access license. All its content is available free of charge. Users can read, download, copy, distribute, print, and 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.
DATA POLICY
Authors may submit research data or supplementary materials that are required for confirming the results of the published manuscript. We accept supporting high-resolution images, background datasets, sound or video clips, large appendices, data tables, software applications and other relevant items that cannot be included in the article. Data/supplementary files supplied will be published online on the general-purpose data repository figshare. Each data/supplementary file will be assigned a doi, making it possible to track the citations of the supplementary materials.
We encourage the use of open formats for supplementary/data files where possible. Supplementary files must not contain advertising or other inappropriate materials.
The authors are encouraged to state the availability of their data in their submissions to increase data transparency and allow compliance with data policies (see Article template). Examples of template statements are the following:
- The authors confirm that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article [and/or] its supplementary materials.
- The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in [repository name e.g “figshare”] at http://doi.org/[doi], reference number [reference].
- The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author, [initials]. The data are not publicly available due to [restrictions e.g. their containing information that could compromise the privacy of research participants].
- The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, [author initials], upon reasonable request.
Research data deposited in data repository are not subjected to peer review.
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 4.0 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 the publisher's version (PDF) of their work in an institutional repository, subject-based repository, author's 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.
DISCLAIMER
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 compensation claims.
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.
INSTITUTE