 | |
| Founded | 2007; 18 years ago (2007) |
|---|---|
| Founder | Kamila Markram and Henry Markram |
| Country of origin | Switzerland |
| Headquarters location | Lausanne |
| Publication types | Open accessscientific journals |
| Nonfiction topics | Medicine,life sciences,technology |
| No. of employees | >1,400 (2022)[1] |
| Official website | www |
Frontiers Media SA is a publisher ofpeer-reviewed,open access,scientific journals[2] currently active inscience,technology, andmedicine. It was founded in 2007 by Kamila andHenry Markram.[1] Frontiers is based inLausanne, Switzerland, with offices in the United Kingdom, Spain, and China.[3] In 2022, Frontiers employed more than 1,400 people, across 14 countries.[1] All Frontiers journals are published under aCreative Commons Attribution License.[4]
In 2015, Frontiers Media was classified as a possiblepredatory publisher byJeffrey Beall,[5] though Beall's list was taken offline two years later[6] in a decision that remains controversial.
The first journal published wasFrontiers in Neuroscience, which opened for submission as abeta version in 2007.[citation needed] In 2010, Frontiers launched a series of another 11 journals inmedicine andscience. In February 2012, the Frontiers Research Network was launched,[7] asocial networking platform for researchers, intended to disseminate the open access articles published in the Frontiers journals, and to provide related conferences, blogs, news, video lectures and job postings.[8]
In February 2013, theNature Publishing Group (NPG) (nowNature Research) acquired a controlling interest in Frontiers Media,[9] however collaboration between the Nature Publishing Group and Frontiers ended in 2015.[10]
Frontiers for Young Minds was launched in November 2013 during the Annual Meeting of theSociety for Neuroscience in collaboration with NPG as a web-based science journal that involves young people in the review of scientific articles with the help of scientists who act as mentors.[11][12]
In early September 2014, Frontiers received the ALPSP Gold Award for Innovation in Publishing from theAssociation of Learned and Professional Society Publishers.[13]
In October 2015, Frontiers (in collaboration with NPG) launched Loop, a research network that is open to be integrated into any publisher's or academic organization's website,[14][15] and Loop soon included a collaboration withORCID to link and synchronize researcher profile information.[16] TheTechnical University of Madrid was the first university to link their Loop profile to their institutional website.[17]
In 2019, Frontiers joined theInitiative for Open Citations.[18]
In May 2020, Frontiers Media launched its Artificial Intelligence Review Assistant software to external editors.[19] The software helps identify conflicts of interest andplagiarism, assesses manuscript andpeer review quality, and recommends editors and reviewers,[19][20] although the software does not flag all forms of conflict of interest, such as undisclosed funding sources or affiliations.[19]
In 2022, a group of publishers including Frontiers Media joined theInternational Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers' STM Integrity Hub, an initiative to provide publishers with tools to combat journal article submissions with integrity issues fromresearch paper mills.[21]
The Frontiers journals useopen peer review, where the names of reviewers of accepted articles are made public.[22]
In February 2016, the company published 54 journals,[23] a number that grew to over 230 journals by 2024.[24] The collection of all the journals in the series is sometimes considered amegajournal, as is theBioMed Central series.[23][25][26] Some journals, such asFrontiers in Human Neuroscience[27] orFrontiers in Microbiology[28] are considered megajournals on their own. Some journals published by Frontiers are:
as well as
The National Publication Committee of Norway has assigned Frontiers Media an institutional-level rating of "level 0" in theNorwegian Scientific Index since 2018, indicating that the publisher is "not academic",[29] however individual Frontiers journals have separate journal-level ratings. As of 2022, 96 Frontiers journals are listed in the Norwegian Scientific Index, of which 2 have a rating of "level 2" (top 20% of all journals in their field), over 88 have a rating of "level 1" (standard academic), 1 has a rating of level X (possibly predatory), and 5 have a rating of "level 0" (not academic).[29]
As of 2022, Frontiers publishes over 185 academic journals, including 48 journals indexed within theScience Citation Index Expanded, and 4 journals indexed within theSocial Sciences Citation Index,[30] with a total of 51 journals ranked with animpact factor.[31] Furthermore, as of 2021, 9 Frontiers Media journals have been selected for inclusion inMEDLINE.[32]
In broader databases, Frontiers has over 200 journals indexed in theDirectory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ),[33] over 60 journals listed inPubMed Central (PMC),[34] and over 110 journals listed inScopus.[35]
Frontiers journals are included in theDirectory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ); the publisher has been on DOAJ's advisory board & council since 2019.[36] Frontiers is also a member of theOpen Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA); a participating publisher and supporter of theInitiative for Open Citations; a member of theCommittee on Publication Ethics (COPE); and a member of theInternational Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM). As of 2023,[update] Frontiers publishes over 220 academic journals, and following the 2023 release of theWeb of Science Group'sJournal Citation Reports (JCR 2022) andScopus'CiteScore, 72 of the journals published by Frontiers have a Journal Impact Factor and 79 journals have a CiteScore.[37]
In May 2015, Frontiers Media removed the entireeditorial boards ofFrontiers in Medicine andFrontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine aftereditors complained that Frontiers Media staff were "interfering with editorial decisions and violating core principles of medical publishing". In total 31 editors were removed. Following this incident,Nature Publishing Group ended its collaboration with Frontiers with the intent "never to mention again that Nature Publishing Group has some kind of involvement in Frontiers."[10]
In June 2015,Retraction Watch referred to the publisher as one with "a history of badly handled and controversial retractions and publishing decisions".[38]
According to researchers referenced in a 2015 blog post quoted by Allison andJames Kaufman in the 2018 bookPseudoscience: The Conspiracy Against Science, "Frontiers has used an in-house journals management software that does not give reviewers the option to recommend the rejection of manuscripts" and the "system is setup to make it almost impossible to reject papers".[39] However, as of 2022, Frontiers maintains that reviewers are given the option to reject papers with specific recommendations.[40]
In 2017, further editors were removed, allegedly for their rejection rate being high.[citation needed] In December 2017, Adam Marcus andIvan Oransky ofRetraction Watch wrote in the magazineNautilus that the acceptance rate of manuscripts in Frontiers journals was reported to be near 90%.[41]
In 2022, the editors of a special issue with the online journalFrontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics voiced their concerns about the editorial practices at Frontiers, including flaws in the peer review process, unwillingness to discuss these concerns, and forbidding the editors from writing about their concerns in the editorial of the special issue.[42]
In January 2023,Zhejiang Gongshang University (浙江工商大学) in Hangzhou, China, announced it would no longer include articles published inHindawi,MDPI, and Frontiers journals when evaluating researcher performance.[43][44]
Also in January 2023,Inria released recommendations on "grey-zone publishers", namely Frontiers and MDPI, highlighting stark differences in editorial process between titles owned by Frontiers and other journals in the fields of Computer Science and Mathematics, and urging "extreme vigilance about the quality of articles published by Frontiers."[45]
In 2024, a study highlighted how MDPI, Frontiers, and Hindawi journals had massively increased their publishing of special issue articles, associated with very rapid article acceptances. This has raised concerns over the quality of the Frontiers peer review process.[46]
In October 2015, Frontiers was added toBeall's List of "Potential, possible, or probable"predatory open-access publishers.[47][48] The inclusion was met with backlash among some researchers.[47] Daniël Lakens, researcher at theEindhoven University of Technology, said "articles people have published in Frontiers are no longer judged based on their own quality, but are now seen as less valuable because Frontiers is on Beall's list" and that "[h]aving a single influential individual cast doubt on such a huge journal feels very unfair".[49] At the time, theCommittee on Publication Ethics (COPE) said that "there have been vigorous discussions about, and some editors are uncomfortable with, the editorial processes at Frontiers" but that "the processes are declared clearly on the publisher's site and we do not believe there is any attempt to deceive either editors or authors about these processes".[50] Frontiers was a member of COPE; the statement concluded that "we have no concerns about Frontiers being a COPE member and are happy to work with them".[50] For transparency, COPE added that one of Frontiers' employees, Mirjam Curno, sits on COPE's council, although that employee was not involved in the statement.[50]
In July 2016 the maintainer of Beall's List,Jeff Beall, recommended that academics not publish their work in Frontiers journals, stating "the fringe science published in Frontiers journals stigmatizes the honest research submitted and published there",[51] and in October of that year Beall reported that reviewers have called the review process "merely for show".[52]
In September 2016, Frontiers demanded that the university where Beall worked force him to retract his claims.[53][54] Beall deleted his blacklist in January 2017.[55] Pressure by Frontiers was reported to be a large factor in the controversial shutdown of Beall's List.[54]
In April 2013,Frontiers in Psychology retracted a controversial article linkingclimate change denialism and "conspiracist ideation";[56][irrelevant citation] the retraction was itself also controversial and led to the resignations of at least three editors.[57]
In late September 2014,Frontiers in Public Health published a controversial article that supportedHIV denialism; three days later the publisher issued a statement of concern and announced an investigation into the review process of the article.[58] It was eventually decided that the article would not be retracted but instead was reclassified as an opinion piece.[59] It has since been retracted.[60]
In November 2016, a paper inFrontiers in Public Health linkingvaccines to autism was provisionally-accepted, then retracted. Public criticism noted the paper relied on flawed methodology for reliable results, basing its conclusions only on an online questionnaire, filled in by 415 mothers of school children who self-reported whether their children had neurodevelopmental disorders, and their vaccination status.[61]
In 2021, a provisionally accepted controversial paper inFrontiers in Pharmacology onCOVID-19 and the use of the antiparasitic drugivermectin was ultimately rejected by the editors as it contained "unsubstantiated claims and violated the journal's editorial policies". This drew anger from the authors of the paper, who called the move "censorship".[62]Retraction Watch noted that this was not the first time Frontiers provisionally accepted and then rejected a controversial paper.[63]
A study published inFrontiers in Virology in February 2022 said thatModerna had patented a 19 nucleotide genetic sequence uniquely matching a part of theSARS-CoV-2 spike protein three years prior to the pandemic, arguing it was evidence that the virus was manufactured as part of alab leak conspiracy.[64][65] The study has been widely derided for its misunderstanding of statistical likelihood, particularly as the 19 nucleotide sequence is not unique to SARS-CoV-2, and is also found in organisms like bacteria and birds.[65][66] Craig Wilen, an immunobiology professor of theYale School of Medicine, likened the study to "complete garbage" and a "conspiracy theory" rather than legitimate research.[64][67]
A now-retracted 2024 paper published inFrontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology[68] was criticized for havingfigures AI generated withMidjourney, described as featuring "garbled text and a wildly incorrect diagram of a rat penis".[69][70] Microbiologist and scientific integrity consultantElisabeth Bik described it as being "a sad example of how scientific journals, editors, and peer reviewers can be naive—or possibly even in the loop—in terms of accepting and publishing AI-generated crap".[69]
Series, such as theBMC Series ... orFrontiers in [...] Series ... might, taken as a whole, be viewed as a broad disciplinary scope journal. This is particularly the case when series titles seem to be marketed and managed as a coherent set rather than as separate titles.
Frontiers has used an in-house journal management software that does not give reviewers the option to recommend the rejection of manuscripts they have reviewed. The publisher's systems are set up to make it almost impossible to reject papers, perhaps to keep potential revenue from jumping to a rival publisher. Increasingly, journal management software is designed to optimize a publisher's revenue.
Frontiers disagrees with this librarian's privately held views, thepublisher demands of his academic employer to impose disciplinary measures or coercion against Beall.
