Frontiers Media
Frontiers Media SA is a publisher of peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journals currently active in science, technology, and medicine. It was founded in 2007 by Kamila and Henry Markram. Frontiers is based in Lausanne, Switzerland, with offices in the United Kingdom, Spain, and China. In 2022, Frontiers employed more than 1,400 people, across 14 countries. All Frontiers journals are published under a Creative Commons Attribution License.
In 2015, Frontiers Media was classified as a possible predatory publisher by Jeffrey Beall, though Beall's list was taken offline two years later after Frontiers applied pressure to Beall's employer, the University of Colorado, in a decision that remains controversial. As of 2023, Frontiers Media receives an institutional-level rating of "level 0" in the Norwegian Scientific Index, a rating it kept since 2018, indicating that the publisher is "not academic", 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", over 88 have a rating of "level 1", 1 has a rating of level X, and 5 have a rating of "level 0".
In 2022, various Swiss authors and institutions had a national publishing agreement with Frontiers through the Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries.
History
The first journal published was Frontiers in Neuroscience, which opened for submission as a beta version in 2007. In 2010, Frontiers launched a series of another 11 journals in medicine and science. In February 2012, the Frontiers Research Network was launched, a social 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.In February 2013, the Nature Publishing Group acquired a controlling interest in Frontiers Media, however collaboration between the Nature Publishing Group and Frontiers ended in 2015.
Frontiers for Young Minds was launched in November 2013 during the Annual Meeting of the Society 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.
In early September 2014, Frontiers received the ALPSP Gold Award for Innovation in Publishing from the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers.
In October 2015, Frontiers launched Loop, a research network that is open to be integrated into any publisher's or academic organization's website, and Loop soon included a collaboration with ORCID to link and synchronize researcher profile information. The Technical University of Madrid was the first university to link their Loop profile to their institutional website.
In 2019, Frontiers joined the Initiative for Open Citations.
In May 2020, Frontiers Media launched its Artificial Intelligence Review Assistant software to external editors. The software helps identify conflicts of interest and plagiarism, assesses manuscript and peer review quality, and recommends editors and reviewers, although the software does not flag all forms of conflict of interest, such as undisclosed funding sources or affiliations.
In 2022, a group of publishers including Frontiers Media joined the International 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 from research paper mills.
List of journals
The Frontiers journals use open peer review, where the names of reviewers of accepted articles are made public.In February 2016, the company published 54 journals, a number that grew to over 230 journals by 2024. The collection of all the journals in the series is sometimes considered a megajournal, as is the BioMed Central series. Some journals, such as Frontiers in Human Neuroscience or Frontiers in Microbiology are considered megajournals on their own. Some journals published by Frontiers are:
as well as
Indexing and abstracting
The National Publication Committee of Norway has assigned Frontiers Media an institutional-level rating of "level 0" in the Norwegian Scientific Index since 2018, indicating that the publisher is "not academic", 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", over 88 have a rating of "level 1", 1 has a rating of level X, and 5 have a rating of "level 0".As of 2022, Frontiers publishes over 185 academic journals, including 48 journals indexed within the Science Citation Index Expanded, and 4 journals indexed within the Social Sciences Citation Index, with a total of 51 journals ranked with an impact factor. Furthermore, as of 2021, 9 Frontiers Media journals have been selected for inclusion in MEDLINE.
In broader databases, Frontiers has over 200 journals indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, over 60 journals listed in PubMed Central, and over 110 journals listed in Scopus.
Frontiers journals are included in the Directory of Open Access Journals ; the publisher has been on DOAJ's advisory board & council since 2019. Frontiers is also a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association ; a participating publisher and supporter of the Initiative for Open Citations; a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics ; and a member of the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers. Frontiers publishes over 220 academic journals, and following the 2023 release of the Web of Science Group's Journal Citation Reports and Scopus' CiteScore, 72 of the journals published by Frontiers have a Journal Impact Factor and 79 journals have a CiteScore.
Controversies
Editorial concerns
In May 2015, Frontiers Media removed the entire editorial boards of Frontiers in Medicine and Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine after editors 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".In June 2015, Retraction Watch referred to the publisher as one with "a history of badly handled and controversial retractions and publishing decisions".
According to researchers referenced in a 2015 blog post quoted by Allison and James Kaufman in the 2018 book Pseudoscience: 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". However, as of 2022, Frontiers maintains that reviewers are given the option to reject papers with specific recommendations.
In 2017, further editors were removed, allegedly for their rejection rate being high. In December 2017, Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky of Retraction Watch wrote in the magazine Nautilus that the acceptance rate of manuscripts in Frontiers journals was reported to be near 90%.
In 2022, the editors of a special issue with the online journal Frontiers 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.
In January 2023, Zhejiang Gongshang University in Hangzhou, China, announced it would no longer include articles published in Hindawi, MDPI, and Frontiers journals when evaluating researcher performance.
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."
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.
Inclusion in Beall's list
In October 2015, Frontiers was added to Beall's List of "Potential, possible, or probable" predatory open-access publishers. The inclusion was met with backlash among some researchers. Daniël Lakens, researcher at the Eindhoven 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 "aving a single influential individual cast doubt on such a huge journal feels very unfair". At the time, the Committee on Publication Ethics 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". 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". 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.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", and in October of that year Beall reported that reviewers have called the review process "merely for show".
In September 2016, Frontiers demanded that the university where Beall worked force him to retract his claims. Beall deleted his blacklist in January 2017. Pressure by Frontiers was reported to be a large factor in the controversial shutdown of Beall's List.