The Journal of Food Proection beginning in January 2023 will be published as a fully open access publication, the International Association for Food Protection (IAFP) announced Wednesday.
IAFP said the Journal of Food Protection will be published as an open access journal with Elsevier, the Netherlands-based academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as The Lancet, Cell, the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, Trends, the Current Opinion series, the online citation database Scopus, the SciVal tool for measuring research performance, the ClinicalKey search engine for clinicians, and the ClinicalPath evidence-based cancer care service.
A publication is defined as ‘open access’ when there are no financial, legal, or technical barriers to accessing it – that is to say when anyone can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search for and search within the information, or use it in education or in any other way within the legal agreements.
“The mission of IAFP is to provide food safety professionals worldwide with a forum to exchange information on protecting the food supply. IAFP’s decision was motivated in part by the Editorial Board’s desire to make JFP’s essential research open to all and to reach the widest audience across all its sectors in corporate, government, and education. ” according to the announcement. “As prior issues of the Journal of Food Protection older than five years were made free to read online, usage data skyrocketed, confirming a need for the content. These back files include JFP’s two prior titles: Journal of Milk and Food Technology (1947-1976) and Journal of Milk Technology (1937-1946)
“Noticeable growth in authors choosing open access indicated a desire to have their content freely available for all to read. In the current model, all authors already pay page charges. This fee will be replaced by an Article Publishing Charge of $1,600 for IAFP’s Members, for which the articles will become fully accessible upon publication. Under this model, authors can also share their research more broadly, without paywalls or copyright issues, IAFP said.
Following a full exploration and consideration of its options, the IAFP Executive Board chose to work with Elsevier based on their experience transitioning subscription journals to fully open access journals and the strength of their platform that will help increase the discovery and visibility of JFP content. The agreement will reduce the cost of open-access publishing for both Members and nonmembers.
IAFP looks forward to making all JFP research available for everyone to read, download, copy, and distribute.
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