Six years old and growing strongly

The manuscript describes the development of the Food and Energy Security Journal, from creation to now. Almost a decade ago, the Association of Applied Biologists (AAB) recognized the need for a journal not only reporting and bringing together seminal research but also providing an interactive forum for discussions in the arena of food and energy security, two of the greatest challenges currently faced by humankind and indeed by the applied science community. The vision of launching a specialist journal in these important and broad-ranging fields was driven by the president of the AAB Prof. Trevor Hocking who saw the journal playing a major role for scientists and their stakeholders particularly in the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) which represent about a quarter of the world's land mass and 40% of its population. The AAB developed its ideas with Wiley for a new open-access peer-reviewed journal: Food and Energy Security jointly owned by AAB with Wiley. This was developed and launched with the first volume and issue in July 2012. Anyone who has been involved with journals will agree with how difficult it is to start a brand new journal. Winning submissions for a journal that had just been launched and is not indexed in any literature database is a challenge. So we invited top experts in a number of fields to submit their manuscripts to the journal. It was hard work, but we were extremely fortunate to have been so well received by many who trusted the idea, the journal and the team, and submitted novel research and review papers who became the major selling point for the journal. The team worked hard, and after only 6 years, FES is already indexed in all major literature database and has been granted high CiteScore by Scopus leading the Subject Rankings of Agricultural and Biological Sciences: Forestry; Food Science; Agronomy and Crop Science; and 6th place in Energy: Renewable Energy, Sustainability, and the Environment. The Scimago SJR was also high (3.64) and in 2017, after being indexed in the previous year in the Web of Science™ (Clarivate Analytics), we are thrilled to announce that FES has now been included in the 2016 Journal Citation Report (JCR) and it is currently listed with an Impact Factor of 2.286, with just 4.17% of self-citations. A pretty good start! According to the Web of Science™, FES has published 91 papers in two subject categories, Agronomy and Food Science Technology, from 292 authors, around 130 distinct institutions, 32 countries from all continents except Antarctica (Table 1), and financed by over 60 different funding agencies. Of the 91 papers published, 68 have already been cited. Although UK authors predominated in the papers published, we are pleased to see that a good share of the papers was from the BRICS countries (23%) plus several papers from countries from Africa, South America, and Asia, and others from countries such as Australia, Mexico, and the USA. Among these papers, a large diversity of subjects has been focus of the research published and some fields have received special attention; for instance, research articles on plant responses to abiotic stresses such as the work by Fidalgo et al. (2013) who reported that Solanum nigrum plants capacity to cope with copper (Cu) toxicity and its tolerance is based on cellular protective mechanisms (immobilization of Cu excess in the root) and intracellular chelation with phytochelatins and metallothioneins. In a just published article, the same group tested the hypothesis that Solanum cheesmaniae is more adapted to Cu stress than Solanum lycopersicum, as the former is equipped with a more efficient antioxidant defense system than the latter (Branco-Neves et al., 2017). This information will help the development of breeding strategies toward the improvement of the resistance/tolerance of cultivated tomato species to heavy metal stress. Copper was also the focus of another paper in which the effects of excess Cu in vineyard soils on the mineral nutrition of potato genotypes were investigated by Farias et al. (2013). Metallic trace elements such as Cu, Fe, Mn, and Zn are essential micronutrients for plants an can accumulate in edible parts of a plant, and Teklić, Lončarić, Kovačević, and Singh (2013) article addressed the contents of such elements in cereal grains and questioned how much of these elements we eat. Although metals can be a major problem in the environment particularly due to anthropogenic activities, drought and flood are possibly the two most prevalent abiotic stresses causing major yield losses worldwide. In the review paper by Rubaiyath Bin Rahman and Zhang (2016), the authors discussed and presented recent progresses of flood and drought tolerance research in rice. Stress resilience in crop plants has also been the focus of two recent papers where the authors comment on the opportunities for plant scientists seeking to address the world's growing food security challenge by exploiting new understanding of the basis of crop stress resilience (Davies & Ribaut, 2017; Gilliham, Chapman, Martin, Jose, & Bastow, 2017). Pollution and climate change can be easily listed as key research topics that are continuously gaining attention and Adhikari, Nejadhashemi, and Woznicki (2015) reviewed the impact of climate change on major crops in Eastern Africa. Gommes, Wu, Li, and Zeng (2016) presented a study with sixty-five monitoring and reporting units (MRU) that were designed for monitoring the impact of agroclimatic factors on crops at the global scale, and the results showed that the current distribution of major food crops fits well into the ecologically defined MRUs. The intensive use of agrochemicals and their impact on food production have been the focus of the review paper recently published by Carvalho (2017). The acrylamide problem for the food industry has gained major attention particularly over the last 10 years, and Curtis and Halford (2016) discussed in their paper actions that are recommended for the farming and food-processing industries to mitigate the formation of acrylamide. Several crops have been the focus of the research published in FES, but wheat predominated with a variety of aspects investigated. Wheat is the most important staple crop in temperate zones and a major source of starch and energy, but also provides substantial amounts of a number of components, which are essential or beneficial for health (Shewry & Hey, 2015). Mackay, Ober, and Hickey (2015) reviewed the use of the GplusE strategy for genomic selection in a large project to optimize programme design and pump-prime genomic selection for UK wheat breeding. Fruiting efficiency was investigated and discussed in the research paper by Slafer et al. (2015) as an alternative trait to increase wheat yield further, whereas Mazzafera (2012) questioned in his review paper which was the by-product, caffeine, or decaf coffee? The review puts into context the caffeine market and the author discusses that while much attention is being paid on decaf coffee, perhaps natural caffeine has become more important and the by-product may now be decaf coffee. Finally, FES has also begun to produce virtual issues on topics covered in specific conferences as was the case for the special issue on “Biomass and Energy Crops,” which was based on the contributions (see Carlton, 2016) of invited speakers to “Biomass and Energy Crops V” a conference held in Brussels during October 2015 and organized by the Association of Applied Biologists in partnership with Rothamsted Research, LogistEC, Rockwood, and SuperGen Bioenergy Hub. Also, FES was the journal of choice of the Global Plant Council (GPC) for four commentary/research papers (see editorial by Martin, Jose, & Bastow, 2017 in Food and Energy Security Volume 6, Issue 1—February 2017, and Borrell & Reynolds, 2017; Buchanan-Wollaston, Wilson, Tardieu, Beynon, & Denby, 2017; Davies & Ribaut, 2017; Gilliham et al., 2017) resulting from their meeting held in Iguaçu Falls, Brazil, in October 2015. This discussion meeting focused on “Stress resilience of crops and cropping systems” and was supported by the Society for Experimental Biology and other funders. This development is illustrative of the international support and profile that our journal has developed in the short time since its start-up. It has been 6 exciting years, but we are ready for much more and to provide our readers with the best high-quality original research on agricultural crop and forest productivity and help our society to meet major challenges such as to produce more crop yield on less land, using less water, fertilizer, fungicides, and pesticides than ever before. We would like to thank the authors who have submitted their work to the journal, the reviewers, the Editorial Board, and Editorial Teams at AAB and Wiley. None declared.

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