image: Prof Christopher Topping joins Food and Ecological Systems Modelling Journal as a co-Editor-in-Chief. view more
Credit: Christopher Topping and Pensoft
Prof Christopher John Topping - Full Professor in Ecological Modelling and centre leader for the Social-Ecological Systems Simulation centre (SESS) at Aarhus University, Denmark - joins Matthias Filter (Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, Germany) as a co-Editor-in-Chief of the recently renovated open-access peer-reviewed Food and Ecological Systems Modelling Journal (FESMJ).
At Aarhus University, Topping is working with large simulation models, typically at landscape scale, including models of many types of taxa of plants and animals and also people.
Launched in early 2020 under the name Food Modelling Journal, the scholarly outlet was designed to encourage food science specialists, agronomists and computer scientists to come together and work on assuring and improving food supply, quality and safety in our globalised and rapidly changing world.
What made the journal quite unique on the academic scene since day one, is that it supports executable papers, where users can reproduce research findings using the published model and running it either with default or new parameters. By clicking an "Execute" button within the body of the article, users are taken to an external virtual environment where they are able to execute the computation. By 'encapsulating' all the details needed to perform the action within the paper, this feature ensures that the published findings remain testifiable in the long term.
In addition to expanding its editorial team by onboarding Topping, FESMJ now extends its scope to cover research in the areas of Agriculture, Food, Social-Ecological Interactions, Bioeconomy, Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences.
“My motivation to engage with FESMJ is to help provide a vehicle for publishing scientific models from the perspective of modellers, and to give credit for the often huge effort needed to craft these. I hope that this journal can become the natural first choice for publishing ecological and socio-ecological models, and that we can contribute to raising the standard of model communication in scientific literature,” says Topping.
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About Food and Ecological Systems Modelling Journal (FESMJ):
FESMJ is an innovative open access journal which facilitates the publication of mathematical models, datasets and software solutions in the areas of Agriculture, Food, Social-Ecological Interactions, Bioeconomy, Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences. The journal focuses on submissions documenting the following outcomes of the research cycle: data, models, model validation studies, software, data analytics pipelines and visualisation methods.
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About Pensoft:
Pensoft is an independent academic publishing company, well-known worldwide for its innovations in the field of semantic publishing, as well as for its cutting-edge publishing tools and workflows. In 2013, Pensoft launched the first ever end to end XML-based authoring, reviewing and publishing workflow, as demonstrated by the Pensoft Writing Tool (PWT), now upgraded to the ARPHA Publishing Platform. Flagship titles include: ZooKeys, PhytoKeys, MycoKeys, Biodiversity Data Journal, Neobiota, Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO), Metabarcoding and Metagenomics (MBMG) and many more.