Category Archives: oa.food

The future of scholarly publishing – 2023 – Journal of Food Science – Wiley Online Library

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“Take-up of Open Access (OA) publication in the Journal of Food Science (JFS) has increased substantially in the past year, and we continue to monitor this. In JFS, we published about 10% of our manuscripts as OA last year, but it’s significantly higher in Comprehensive Reviews (CRFSFS). We’ve heard of publishers pushing society journals to switch to Gold OA (fully-OA publications), but our near-term future will still be hybrid publishing with authors deciding if they want to pay for OA.

Another concern in the move to OA is the risk that underfunded researchers will not be able to pay the OA fees. We participate in Research4Life, so authors in low-income nations can get waivers, but will APC be an obstacle for researchers from middle-income nations not on the Research4Life list?…”

Open Food Facts – United States

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“Open Food Facts is a database of food products with ingredients, allergens, nutrition facts and all the tidbits of information we can find on product labels.

Open Food Facts is a non-profit association of volunteers.

15000+ contributors like you have added 1 000 000+ products from 150 countries using our Android,iPhone or Windows Phone app or their camera to scan barcodes and upload pictures of products and their labels….

Data about food is of public interest and has to be open. The complete database is published as open data and can be reused by anyone and for any use. Check-out the cool reuses or make your own!…”

“Open Source” Seeds Loosen Big Ag’s Grip on Farmers – World Sensorium / Conservancy

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“Just like software development has been co-opted by a few global companies like Microsoft and Apple, the international seed development and trade, too, is controlled by a few big giants like Bayer (Monsanto), Corteva (DuPont) and ChemChina (Syngenta). A 2012 Oxfam study found that four companies dominate more than 60 percent of the global trade with grains….

In 2012, Kloppenburg and half a dozen like-minded agriculture experts founded OSSI [Open Source Seed Initiative] as an alternative to the monopolies. OSSI’s aim is the “free flow and exchange of genetic resources, of plant breeding and variety development,” Kloppenburg says. With global warming, disease and changing climatic patterns, “we need novel plant varieties that are capable of responding to the changes. Farm to table is popular, but we really need to talk about seed to table.”…”

Linux Foundation’s ‘AgStack Project’ Plans First Dataset of the World’s Agricultural Field Boundaries – Slashdot

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“The nonprofit Linux Foundation not only pays the salary of Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman. It also runs the AgStack Foundation, which seeks more efficient agriculture through “free, re-usable, open and specialized digital infrastructure for data and applications.”

And this week that Foundation announced a new open source code base for creating and maintaining a global dataset that’s a kind of registry for the boundaries of agricultural fields to enable field-level analytics like carbon tracking, food traceability, and crop production….”

Journal of Food Protection transition to Open Access: Frequently Asked Questions

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“The Journal of Food Protection will be moving to an open access (OA) publishing model with Elsevier beginning January of 2023! We are excited about this change because: • All articles published open access are immediately and permanently free for everyone to read, download, use and distribute. • All research published in the journal are now immediately and fully available on Agricola, BIOSIS, FSTA, Chemical Abstracts, Dairy Science Abstracts–CABI, Google Scholar, Index Medicus, Pubmed/Medline, Scopus, Science Citation Index, and many more. • Millions of researchers globally will be able to find and read your work for free. • Open access (OA) publishing accelerates the pace of research and encourages sharing and collaboration across disciplines. • It accommodates many global research funders’ requirements. • Our journal research will become more discoverable online….”

Open Science Online Grocery: A Tool for Studying Choice Context and Food Choice | Journal of the Association for Consumer Research: Vol 0, No ja

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Abstract:  The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new tool-The Open Science Online Grocery-for studying the effects of the choice context on purchasing decisions. We first review the features of the tool: a mock online grocery store containing over 11,000 products wherein researchers can modify the choice context (e.g.. positioning, labeling, suggestions) and observe resulting choice. Then, we present three studies illustrating how the tool can help assess how changes to labeling. ordering, and positioning affect choice. We find that both ordering and positioning have significant effects on choice while labeling does not. These findings largely align with existing research in field and laboratory settings. We hope this tool proves useful to researchers wanting to test choice context modifications in a relatively affordable and efficient manner.

Decreasing Costs of Dissemination of Research Results by Publishing in Diamond Open Access Journals – PMC

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“As always, you can read these articles for free, with neither you nor your institution having to pay for their access. The authors did not have to pay for publishing their manuscripts either. Food Technology and Biotechnology is a so-called diamond open access journal. It means that its budget is provided by financial supports of public institutions like the Croatian Ministry of Science and Education, Croatian Academy of Science and Arts, Croatian Society for Biotechnology, as well as the publisher – Faculty of Food Technology and Biotechnology of the University of Zagreb. Diamond open access journals constitute a rather small share of scientific journals in science communication spectrum in which the financiers are neither readers (through institutional library subscriptions), nor authors through article processing charges. Although the number of papers published in diamond OA journals is not high, they are often referred to as the publishing model of the future. The financial pattern in which journals are financed by public institutions, ministries or other state bodies like universities or professional associations avoids high charges imposed by private publishers, liberating more funds for direct research costs, or scientific infrastructure. The model is in line with the ultimate intentions announced by the cOAlition S and formulated in Plan S (1), although other business models for scientific publishing are discussed within this plan, as well. At first sight, diamond OA journals seem like the best solution both for the researchers aiming to publish their results without devoting much of their project funds for this purpose, and to those aiming to access them freely and easily. However, public financing may have pitfalls of their own. Stable long-term financing may be a problem for smaller professional associations whose income may vary significantly from year to year and may depend on the current leadership. Such societies may lose motivation to maintain a journal, particularly if it does not gain any income but whose publishing creates a significant expense. Universities and larger societies with higher annual income may prove as more stable financiers as scientific communication is a part of their ’core business’. Indeed, considering technical possibilities and informatics infrastructure in place at most universities, scientific publishing should not present a significant financial burden. Actually, most diamond access journals are indeed funded by universities (2). On the other hand, journals financed by state public institutions like ministries, public foundations or other bodies distributing public funds may depend on the current political option and their changes may lead to different political decisions reflecting on science budgets and, consequently, scientific journal financing. Besides, it should be noted that some of the high budget professional associations create most of their incomes through publishing activities, sometimes engaging large publishers for their journals. For these societies a turn towards diamond open access would require a significant change in the structure of their annual income. Thus, in a system in which a larger segment of scientific results would be published in diamond open access journals, finding stable sources of income would be a difficult but indispensable task for scientific journal publishers. This conclusion has been strongly corroborated by a large study funded by Science Europe in order to gain a better insight in the OA diamond landscape (2). The study estimated the number of diamond open access journals at around 29 000. Most of these journals are not included in DOAJ, they are smaller in size and publish less than 25 papers per year, many of them are issued annually, and most of them belong to social sciences and humanities. The majority of them are published in Europe and South America by small publishers who publish between 1 and 5 journals. More than 70% of diamond OA journals are published by universities, around 15% by publishing companies, while 10% belong to professional associations. Concerning their operation and financing, most diamond open access journals face operational challenges and rely heavily on the efforts of volunteers. As such, they declare a need to develop infrastructure and to increase funding to support their operations. Securing sufficient and stable funding from sources who would not gain profit from publishing may at least partly be facilitated by decreasing the costs and the overall budget of the journal. More than 70% of diamond OA journals have an annual budget lower than 10 000 euro. This, however, contradicts the increasing demands of the scientific community for fast, simple, and high-quality publishing process. A variety of informatics tools designed for handling manuscripts, correspondence among authors, editors and reviewers, as well as on-line publishing with concomitant abandoning printed versions may lead to less expensive dissemination of scientific results. Development of such tools and their distribution among journals, as w

Developing culturally appropriate food literacy resources for Aboriginal children with Foodbank WA’s Superhero Foods® – Tartaglia – – Health Promotion Journal of Australia – Wiley Online Library

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On an Australian program to develop OER on aboriginal foods. 

“Key enablers to the success of the resource included: free online access, the highly engaging nature of the resources and adaptability to be implemented across a number of Aboriginal language groups in WA. Ensuring visual representation of healthy choices was fundamental to reinforcing nutrition messaging. Superhero Foods resources are a positive and important inclusion in the health promotion toolbox for Aboriginal children.”

Gold open access—A new era for the Journal of Dairy Science – Journal of Dairy Science

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“An ongoing goal of ours has been strengthening the reputation and reach of the Journal of Dairy Science, and a priority has been to provide worldwide and rapid access to journal content to drive impact. We know that supporting innovative content stokes reader interest and sets new platforms for scientific discovery. As such, this move to gold open access has many advantages. First, each author’s work will have increased exposure by enabling access to all readers. Additionally, by publishing in JDS under gold open access, authors can comply with the requirements of many funding agencies and will be in alignment with the Plan S initiative of cOAlition S (https://www.coalition-s.org/) for open access science publishing. The open access model also supports our many partners of public institutions who can now avoid “double paying” to publish and to read JDS content. Gold open access will enhance access to JDS content for dairy scientists and dairy industry professionals in developing countries. JDS remains committed to supporting and participating in AGORA (Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture), a program of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. As with any change, we recognize that this move will bring about some challenges. For example, research-intensive institutions will likely carry greater burdens in supporting publication activities. Open access also brings greater complexity to the ADSA and Fass staff as they work to manage and project workflows and finances under the new model. The ADSA Board of Directors will utilize the superfund to provide a discount for ADSA members to publish in JDS. This superfund member discount will reduce the $1920 APC (the “list price”) to $1600, a savings of $320 per article. Our members represent a global community of dairy scientists; by belonging to ADSA, members enjoy many benefits in addition to reduced APCs, including lower ADSA Annual Meeting and Discover Conference registration fees and access to the online symposium library; members also receive deeply discounted rates to S-PAC among other benefits (https://www.adsa.org/Membership/Benefits-of-Membership). Perhaps most importantly, being a member of ADSA presents numerous opportunities to get involved in the association, acquire leadership skills, and contribute to this scientific and professional community.

As you can imagine, the switch from a hybrid journal to an open access journal requires a high degree of communication and coordination. The following sections describe how this change will happen and what you can expect to see over the next few months….”

Access to biodiversity for food production: Reconciling open access digital sequence information with access and benefit sharing: Molecular Plant

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“Over the last 40 years or so, a complex web of international legal agreements was developed that regulate the access, transfer, and use of plant genetic resources. These include the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the Nagoya Protocol, and the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources (Figure 1). In developing these legal regimes, policy makers struggled to balance a number of conflicting demands. These included ensuring that access providers share in the benefits that arise from the use of their genetic resources; that users who value-add to genetic resources can protect their innovations via intellectual property; and, at the same time, that scientists and breeders have ongoing access to genetic resources. While there are problems with the existing regimes, they have reached an uneasy compromise of sorts….”

 

 

Access to biodiversity for food production: Reconciling open assess digital sequence information with access and benefit sharing – ScienceDirect

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“Over the last forty years or so, a complex web of international legal agreements were developed that regulate the access, transfer, and use of plant genetic resources. These include the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the Nagoya Protocol, and the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources (Figure 1). In developing these legal regimes, policy makers struggled to balance a number of conflicting demands. These included ensuring that access providers share in the benefits that arise from the use of their genetic resources; that users who value-add to genetic resources can protect their innovations via intellectual property; and, at the same time, that scientists and breeders have ongoing access to genetic resources. While there are problems with the existing regimes, they have reached an uneasy compromise of sorts. In recent years, dramatic changes in the life sciences have threatened to undermine this complex and fragile balance (Unamba et al., 2015). These changes have been facilitated by new genomic technologies such as gene editing and synthetic biology (McDaniel and Weiss, 2005), by improved and cheaper sequencing technologies (Schaffer, 2007) which rapidly increased the availability of DNA sequence data, and advances in whole genome sequencing (Figure 1). Genomics is now a major source of data, rivalling big data disciplines like astronomy in the pace of data acquisition, storage, and analysis (Stephens et al., 2015). Open access international data repositories, such as GenBank, the DNA Databank of Japan, and European Molecular Biological Laboratory, that house a huge amount of DNA sequencerelated data (estimated at over 1.5 billion sequences) (WiLDSI , 2020) facilitate the sharing and use of digital sequence information (DSI) (Ad Hoc Technical Group on Digital Sequence Information 2015). The scientific value of public databases largely comes from the aggregation of data that allows scientists to identify patterns across the stored sequences (WiLDSI, 2020)….”

European Food Safety Authority open access tools to estimate dietary exposure to food chemicals – PubMed

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Abstract:  The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has developed a suite of open access tools to estimate dietary exposure to food-borne chemical hazards. The tools are tailored to several regulatory domains within EFSA’s remit (e.g. food and feed additives, pesticide residues, contaminants and food enzymes) and are intended for use by EFSA experts, industry applicants of regulatory product dossiers, researchers or any stakeholder with an interest in estimating dietary exposure using European food consumption data. The majority of the tools are based on FoodEx2, EFSA’s food classification and description system as well as the EFSA Comprehensive European food consumption database. This paper provides an overview of these open access tools, the regulatory framework in which they were developed as well as data sources used.

 

Microorganisms | Free Full-Text | Microbiome Research: Open Communication Today, Microbiome Applications in the Future

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Abstract:  Microbiome research has recently gained centre-stage in both basic science and translational applications, yet researchers often feel that public communication about its potential overpromises. This manuscript aims to share a perspective on how scientists can engage in more open, ethical and transparent communication using an ongoing research project on food systems microbiomes as a case study. Concrete examples of strategically planned communication efforts are outlined, which aim to inspire and empower other researchers. Finally, we conclude with a discussion on the benefits of open and transparent communication from early-on in innovation pathways, mainly increasing trust in scientific processes and thus paving the way to achieving societal milestones such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the EU Green Deal. View Full-Text

 

Open risk assessment: methods and expertise – Verloo – 2016 – EFSA Journal – Wiley Online Library

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Abstract:  Risk analysis and risk governance face a decline in social trust at both the scientific and policy levels. The involvement of society in the process has been proposed as an approach to increasing trust and engagement by making better use of available data and knowledge. In this session, EFSA explored the challenges in building trust and engagement and the latest thinking and methodologies for increasing openness that can help the organisation to move beyond traditional dialogue and towards a more sustainable stakeholder and society interaction. The discussion centred on the needs of EFSA and of target audiences throughout the process, from risk assessment initiation through societal decision-making and communication. The main focus of the session was on methodologies and approaches that would enable EFSA to increase its scientific rigour and build trust from additional inputs gained by opening up its risk assessments at the level of data gathering, data analysis, expertise and innovation. This will require an approach that moves beyond traditional risk assessment practices that rely on a long chain of static information and knowledge such as scientific articles, reviews, expert groups and committees.

Open risk assessment: data – Gilsenan – 2016 – EFSA Journal – Wiley Online Library

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Abstract:  Since its foundation, EFSA and the Member States have made significant progress in the area of data collection for risk assessment and monitoring. In partnership with competent authorities and research organisations in the Member States, EFSA has become a central hub of the European data on food consumption, chemical occurrence and foodborne outbreaks. Beyond EFSA’s use of these data and sharing of contaminants and food consumption data with the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization to support international risk assessment, they remain largely unexploited. In addition, for some of its risk assessments, EFSA also relies on published information, as well as on scientific studies sponsored and submitted by industry. The environment in which the Authority operates has significantly evolved since its foundation. The growth of digital technology has granted scientists and consumers alike faster and more efficient access to data and information. The open data movement, which has entered the sphere of the European Union institutions, is unleashing the potential for reuse of data. In parallel, the work of EFSA is increasingly subject to demands for more openness and transparency across its spectrum of stakeholders. EFSA aims to enhance the quality and transparency of its outputs by giving access to data and promoting the development of collaborative platforms in Europe and internationally. EFSA also plans to work with data providers and organisations funding research to adopt open data concepts and standards; gaining better access to, and making better use of, data from a wider evidence base. During the breakout session on ‘Open Risk Assessment: Data’ at the EFSA 2nd Scientific Conference ‘Shaping the Future of Food Safety, Together’ (Milan, Italy, 14–16 October 2015) opportunities and challenges associated with open data, data interoperability and data quality were discussed by sharing experiences from various sectors within and outside EFSA’s remit. This paper provides an overview of the presentations and discussions during the breakout session.