In a significant step towards fostering innovation in sustainable food systems, IFIS Publishing proudly announces the launch of IFIS Sustainability, a groundbreaking free database, this World Food Day.

Supporting sustainable food science

IFIS Sustainability is a new digital tool providing food innovators access to the latest in sustainable food science. Designed to empower researchers, policymakers, and industry professionals, the free-to-access platform brings cutting-edge food science to the forefront, making it accessible and discoverable by consolidating valuable research in one centralized and user-friendly location, as technology change how we get and order food now a days, from the supermarket to buying cookies online if you feel like having something sweet.

Updated weekly, the dynamic A&I database is a comprehensive collection of scientific insights, carefully curated and indexed by an expert team of food and data scientists to exclude junk science and predatory content, allowing decision-makers to base their strategies on trustworthy information.

With the ambition of promoting a holistic understanding of sustainable food practices, IFIS Sustainability takes a multidisciplinary approach, allowing users to explore diverse perspectives, from economics and food policy to ecology and agriculture.

Global collaboration to accelerate progress 

IFIS Sustainability’s launch is strategically aligned with FAO’s World Food Day, emphasizing the need to build collaborative responses to food system challenges.

This year’s World Food Day event highlights the importance of water in the context of sustainable food systems. The theme “Water is life, water is food. Leave no one behind,” resonates with IFIS Publishing’s commitment to providing a reliable and highly accessible resource for research and innovation in the pursuit of sustainable water use and food production.

As Cindy Stewart (PhD), Global Innovation and R&D Executive and IFT Past President, notes: “It is absolutely critical that F&B innovators have access to the latest, trustworthy science to learn from and build on the work of others and bring people together in collaborative efforts. The solutions require multi-disciplinary approaches. It’s great to have a focused database for scientists and others to easily access sound science. IFIS Sustainability is easy to navigate and pulls up topics of interest.”

Explore key research themes

IFIS Sustainability allows food sector stakeholders to stay at the forefront of food sustainability and explore top research themes from ground-breaking innovations to emerging challenges. Keyword analysis of the 10,000+ articles contained in IFIS Sustainability paints a vivid picture of current innovation trends in the food industry. These themes include:

• The economics of sustainability: Practical approaches acknowledging the need for solutions in the broader context of the food market.
• Technological Advancements: Leveraging technology for more efficient and sustainable practices in food processing, packaging, and other areas.
• Policy-Driven Sustainability: Emphasizing the importance of regulatory frameworks in achieving sustainability goals.
• Ecological Concerns: Understanding and mitigating the environmental impact of food production.
• Consumer-Centric Approaches: Exploring how consumer behaviour can be influenced to support sustainable choices.
• Innovations in Agriculture: Promoting sustainable farming practices and ensuring food security.
• Plant-Based Solutions: Exploring the environmental benefits of plant-based diets and sustainable plant-based products.
  

The launch of IFIS Sustainability comes at a critical time for the food system, which is facing myriad challenges as innovators work to transition toward sustainable methods of production and consumption.

“The most pressing sustainability challenge for the F&B industry is for companies and organizations to establish, and continually update, the evidence base for the most sustainable ingredients, processes, and products,” explained Professor Colin Dennis, chairman of IFIS Publishing and the Leadership Development Committee at IFT.

Dennis continued, “It is essential that innovators have access to the latest trustworthy science and technology to avoid wasting resources on re-inventing what is already known. IFIS Sustainability provides access to a professionally curated and highly searchable database of trustworthy science and technology and is an excellent resource for such a purpose.”

As the global community comes together to celebrate World Food Day, IFIS Sustainability invites researchers, policymakers, and all stakeholders to explore the database and contribute to the collective efforts for a sustainable and water-efficient food system. For free access visit IFIS Sustainability.

Springer Nature today announced a new AI-powered in-house writing assistant to support researchers, particularly those whose first language is not English, in their scientific writing.

Global research shows that it takes non-native English speaking scientists 51% more time to write a paper (1). This creates an unequal divide in research, limiting the advancement of knowledge and impacting the submission of high quality research from across the globe. 

Curie is our response. It has been specifically trained on academic literature, spanning 447+ areas of study, more than 2,000 field-specific topics and on over 1 million edits on papers published including those in leading Nature journals. It combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with specialised  AI digital editing developed in-house and designed specifically for scientific writing. Unlike generalist AI writing apps, Curie focuses on the unique pain points of researchers in their professional writing, including translation to English and English language editing to address grammatical errors and improve phrasing and word choice.

When the service was trialed with researchers in China publishing in Scientific Reports and the Discover Series, of the 67% of authors who used the tool, 90% subsequently saw their manuscript proceed to peer review, with a 14% increase in articles published at the end of the trial (2).

Eugenie Regan, Vice President, Research Solutions at Springer Nature said: 

“By evolving our digital experiences to meet the needs of, and support all researchers, we can save them time, enabling them to focus their efforts where they can have the biggest impact – on the groundbreaking research that advances knowledge and propels society forward.”

The service is available for all Springer Nature book and journal authors, and is integrated into the pre-submission checklistfor Springer titles providing authors with a streamlined and simpler way to take advantage of the tool (3). In addition to thisCurie is also available, via Microsoft Word Add-in, making this enhanced author service even more convenient for authors and editors to access and take advantage of.

Curie forms part of a suite of scientific writing solutions, which will continue to be expanded  to support every stage of the research publication process. More about Springer Nature’s author services can be found here.  More about Curie can be found here.

1. https://theconversation.com/non-native-english-speaking-scientists-work-much-harder-just-to-keep-up-global-research-reveals-208750#:~:text=First%2C%20you’ll%20need%2051,salary%20of%20a%20PhD%20student.
2. 793 Chinese authors were given the option to use Curie at the point of submission during a trial in July 2022. 67% opted in, of those 91% rated the tool as good/excellent. Of those that used it 90% of manuscripts went for review, with a 14% uplift in publishing success at the end of the trial. For those authors whose papers would have been highlighted for rejection, based on language quality, there was a 2% uplift in publication success.
3.  Currently only available in the pre-submission checklists for Springer journals. It will be expanded further in due course.

F1000 is delighted to announce that it has been awarded a second contract for the on-going technology and publishing services for Open Research Europe (ORE), the European Commission’s Open Research publishing venue for Horizon funded research and other eligible EC research programs all subject areas.

F1000, which is part of Taylor & Francis group, was awarded a 4-year contract in 2020, tasked with establishing and managing an open access publishing platform for the European Commission, helping them to fulfil their ambition of championing a new publishing model that centres on greater quality, integrity, collaboration, and transparency compared with traditional models. The new contract will see F1000 continue to provide the technology, editorial and communication services for ORE and onboard all of the European Commission framework programmes, which will be eligible to publish on ORE from now on. The publishing platform will also start to take steps towards supporting multilingual publication and enhance the interoperability of the platform with OpenAIRE.

Of the new contract win Rebecca Lawrence, Managing Director, F1000 said: “The incredible success that ORE has achieved in just over two years is testament to the European Commission’s commitment to providing a publishing option to their grantees that actively encourages and supports a shift to more open research practices, for the benefit of research progress and tackling the world’s most pressing challenges, as well as for the research community itself.

“Critical to supporting and enabling a continued shift will be the ongoing commitment of the European Commission and its stakeholders in making changes to the research assessment worldwide, ensuring that research is measured on its intrinsic value rather than publication venue, and that a much broader range of outputs and activities are recognised and rewarded as valuable contributions to research. We are absolutely thrilled to have been selected to continue to partner with them on this remarkable journey and look forward to seeing what more we can achieve together to meet the challenges of the global research community for the next few years”.

With the help of expert partners LIBER, Eurodoc, the Global Young Academy and OpenAIRE ORE was officially launched in March 2021. In the past two years, over 1,800 authors from 340 different institutions and 45 different countries have published their research with Open Research Europe, with over 450 articles covering everything from using artificial intelligence to predict battery degradation to tool use of chimpanzees.

Toma Susi, Scientific Advisory Board member, ORE, continued: “I am glad to hear we will keep working together with F1000 for two more years, both in my role on the Board but also as an author and reviewer on ORE. Their modern technology and active commitment to its success have been vital for making ORE an attractive option for EC-funded researchers who understand that what we discover and how openly we share our work ultimately matters more for the advancement of science and scholarship than any perceived prestige of the outlet. With the gratifying momentum behind research assessment reform and the maturing plans to move to an open platform serving an even larger share of publicly funded research, the future of ORE is bright.”

Authors have fully embraced the ability to publish research outputs at every stage of the research journey through the different article types supported by the platform. While 50% of research published has been as a traditional Research Article, the other 50% is made up of non-traditional article types such as Method Articles, Essays, and Software Tool Articles helping to truly capture the breadth of outputs from across the research lifecycle and helping to reduce research waste.

ORE also aims to support a shift away from journal-based metrics, such as the Impact Factor, through the use of a range of article-level metrics such as views, citations, and downloads as a measure of research impact, to place greater value on the research itself. ORE is fully aligned with, and fully committed to, the outcomes of the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA). In addition, many articles have gained coverage in news outlets such as Forbes and the Columbia Journalism Review, and in policy documents of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the International Renewable Energy Agency.

ORE has also achieved indexation in 10 major databases – a fantastic feat within just two years. Most recently it has been accepted for indexation in PubMed Central, building on 2022’s successes with indexing in Scopus, ERIH PLUS, and Inspec, as well as achieving the DOAJ seal within its first year of publishing.