The first issue of Food Policy was published in November 1975. For the journal’s 50th anniversary, the editors plan to dedicate the November 2025 volume to a special issue featuring two main types of contributions. One will be short (less than 1,000 word) Policy Comments, with details described in the companion Call for Policy Comments.

The other contribution will be substantive, original review papers that offer a state-of-the-art summary of a food policy-relevant literature. These reviews must make clear both the policy relevance of the existing stock of knowledge as well as key remaining research questions. Review papers will be 10,000-15,000 words in length, thus substantially longer than the standard research articles (or even Reviews) we publish.

In order to keep authors from investing considerable time in preparing papers that would be unlikely to survive peer review, we will employ a two-step process for these reviews. First, we invite 2-4 page proposals that clearly identify (i) the topic, (ii) the central theme(s) of the review, including key policy implications of the existing literature and priority topics for future research, (iii) the (co-)author(s) and their qualifications to write such a review, and (iv) the closest review papers/chapters/books to the topic and what differentiates the proposed review paper from that prior work. Submit the proposal in .pdf format via email to the journal’s editorial office at foodpolicy@cornell.edu by August 31, 2024. The editorial board will review all proposals and, by October 1, select those to whom we will extend invitations to submit. (Food Policy only considers Reviews by invitation.)

In the second step, invited authors (and only invited authors) will submit their full Review paper via the journal’s portal no later than April 1, 2025. All reviews will go through full peer review. An invitation to submit is not a commitment to accept for publication; it merely a confirmation that the topic and authors hold appeal to the editors. The same criteria we use to invite reviews more generally will be followed.