When ‘Food Additives and Contaminants’ was first established 25 years ago, food surveillance was relatively new and the journal aimed uniquely to provide a vehicle for publishing survey data. Many of the papers published during the first 15 years, progressively helped to build a picture of the incidence and occurrence of contaminants in the food chain. However, since that time the number of laboratories generating such data has expanded worldwide, which has led to a steady increase in submissions of survey papers to the journal. Unfortunately, it has not been possible to expand the size of the journal to keep pace with this increased number of submissions. Therefore, in the last few years the editors have been, by necessity, very selective in which papers were accepted. Many surveillance papers which were scientifically sound, but only added to accumulated knowledge, rather than adding anything significantly new, have tended no longer to be accepted due to this shortage of journal space.
However, we recognise that survey papers do still need to be published to help to build-up a global picture of food contamination; to enable time trends to be determined and to enable authorities to make exposure assessments. To meet this need the Editors are pleased to announce that during 2008, FAC will split into two parts–FAC Part A continuing to cover ‘Chemistry; Analysis; Control; Exposure & Risk Assessment’, and a new FAC Part B dedicated solely to publishing ‘Surveillance’ data.
We are very mindful that surveillance data is only useful if the quality of such data meets minimum quality standards and only papers which pass a quality threshold will therefore be accepted. The aim is to publish relatively short communications which will provide references to the methodology employed; the method performance characteristics and the data itself in a prescribed format. Part B will be published in electronic and hard copy format, with fast publication of electronic copies (6-8 weeks) and two issues per annum in print.
In the coming months, this initiative will be extended further to the establishment of an electronic database, which will contain all the surveillance data from Part B. This database will enable large datasets of additive, residue and contaminant data to be progressively built in a standardised format. For the end-user, for the first time, rather than having to compile data from printed tables and attempting to reconcile different reporting formats, there will be easy download of data in either standard reports or into spreadsheets for data manipulation. We really believe this new database will be seen as a milestone with ‘FAC’ leading the way in electronic publishing.