The Nutrition Society currently publishes five academic journals that encompass the broad range of research in nutritional science:
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1. British Journal of Nutrition (Br J Nutr) publishes mainly primary research, including systematic reviews and meta-analyses, and short, topical reviews across the range of nutrition disciplines.
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2. Public Health Nutrition (Public Health Nutr) publishes articles related to nutrition and nutrition policy at a population level, including work on assessment, communication, implementation and sustainability.
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3. Proceedings of the Nutrition Society (Proc Nutr Soc) publishes articles that arise from the meetings of the Society.
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4. Nutrition Research Reviews (Nutr Res Rev) publishes in-depth narrative reviews in all areas of nutritional science.
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5. Journal of Nutritional Science (J Nutr Sci) is our newest journal, launched in 2012, which publishes primary research and reviews through a Gold Open Access model.
One continuing aim of the Society is to develop the individual identity of each journal in order to help provide a clear platform for authors and a focus for the readership. Towards this goal, we are clarifying the scope of the Br J Nutr. Specifically, from 1 August 2016, the Br J Nutr will no longer accept articles that fall within the remit of Public Health Nutr. These include articles on the following topics.
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1. Assessment of public health nutrition problems:
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a. papers on monitoring/surveillance of nutritional health status of populations or of the quality of nutritional environments;
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b. papers that analyse psychosocial/behavioural determinants of dietary and nutritional outcomes (behavioural nutrition), and dietary and nutritional factors as determinants of health outcomes (nutritional epidemiology), including structural and societal-level determinants (economics and environment) in population-based samples; and
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c. papers describing development and evaluation of methodology for the above (assessment of diet, nutritional status and anthropometry) in relation to the study of population-based samples.
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2. Communication of nutrition-related information to the public.
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3. Assurance of population-wide access to environments that promote public health nutrition:
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a. public health nutrition workforce development/capacity building; and
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b. evaluation of the effectiveness of nutrition-related public policies.
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4. Interventions and community nutrition programmes and efforts.
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5. Diet/nutrition as related to the environment and sustainability (studies related to agricultural practice and animal production will continue to be published in the Br J Nutr and the J Nutr Sci).
Studies in these areas will be published exclusively in Public Health Nutr. Manuscripts submitted to the Br J Nutr that fall within these areas will be transferred automatically to Public Health Nutr, with the consent of the authors. Manuscripts from authors who decline the offer of transfer will be rejected.
We expect that this change in the remit of the Br J Nutr will provide a useful delineation in scope across these Nutrition Society journals, increase the visibility of articles in public health nutrition to the research community, and guide authors towards the most appropriate platform for their research.
Open Access policy
We would like to remind the nutrition research community of the Open Access publishing options available to authors of articles in the Nutrition Society journals. All Nutrition Society journals offer Gold Open Access as an option but, with the exception of the J Nutr Sci, they rely chiefly on traditional, subscription-based publication. These ‘traditional’ journals also offer authors the option of making their accepted manuscripts and version of record freely available to readers at the time of acceptance through the Society’s Green Open Access Policy, subject to the restrictions summarised in Table 1. This is compliant with the Higher Education Funding Council of England’s Open Access requirements for research outputs( 1 ).
* The version that was accepted by the journal that has not been subjected to typesetting or other modification by the publisher.