Editorial

Dear readers,

During its 30 years of existence, the Journal Ciência e Tecnologia de Alimentos, which has been managed by different editorial boards and editorial policies, has evolved in accordance with the scientific community demands, and today it is part of the international scientific publications in different fields of food science and technology.

Since January 2011, an editorial board that consists of six editors has been working to maintain and improve the quality of the Journal. The lack of financial resources has been overcome by charging submission fees and with the approval of two projects to ensure the journal editing and publishing (CNPq - Process 400193/2011-6 and FAPESP - Process 2011/50829-6). In addition, another project, submitted in compliance with the MCTI/CNPq/MECTI/CAPES 15/2011 public notice, is under evaluation.

During this past year, the Journal has faced a period of transition between Portuguese and English languages. The first two volumes were published with some articles written in English and others in Portuguese. However, this has also changed, and since September, all articles of the journal have been published in English with Portuguese and English abstracts. Moreover, of the 140 manuscripts at the various stages of editorial process when we took over the editorship, approximately 60% have already been processed to the final editorial decision of acceptance or rejection for publication.

In the last three years, the average length of time between submission and acceptance of articles has been 10.1 months, while the length of time between acceptance and publication has been 14.04 months. This means that, on average, it takes 24.1 months to publish an article. This is a considerably long time, which can make the CTA Journal less competitive and attractive for the publication of original high quality research. Therefore, we are now focused on reducing the length of time between submission and publication of articles.

The manuscripts are now pre-screened by the editorial board prior to being sent to the reviewers, which is a major step in this direction. Since the online submission page was reopened (06/05/2011), 165 manuscripts have been submitted for publication, of which 56 (35.0%) did not adhere to the submission guidelines and were therefore returned to the authors, 67 (40.6%) were rejected by the editors after the pre-evaluation process for not meeting the journal standards, 41 (24.8%) are under evaluation, and 01 (0.6%) has been accepted for publication.

With these new criteria and guidelines and the editorial mission to provide researchers with the opportunity to share knowledge advancement through a respected anonymous peer-review process in a shorter period, the CTA journal invites the scientific community to submit their research work for publication in the various areas of food science and technology.

Mirna L. Gigante

Chief editor

Virgínia M. Matta

Associate publisher

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  06 Feb 2012
• Date of issue
  Dec 2011