Frontiers Media

Frontiers Media

Founded	2007; 15 years ago (2007)
Founder	Kamila Markram and Henry Markram[1]
Country of origin	Switzerland
Headquarters location	Lausanne
Key people	Kamila Markram, CEO
Publication types	Open access scientific journals
Nonfiction topics	Medicine, life sciences, technology
No. of employees	762 (2021)[2]
Official website	www.frontiersin.org

Frontiers Media SA is a publisher of peer-reviewed open access scientific journals^[3] currently active in science, technology, and medicine. It was founded in 2007 by a group of neuroscientists,^[4] including Henry and Kamila Markram, and later expanded to other academic fields. Frontiers is based in Lausanne, Switzerland, with other offices in London, Madrid, Seattle and Brussels.^[5] All Frontiers journals are published under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).^[6]

In 2015, Frontiers Media was classified as a possible predatory publisher by Jeffrey Beall. COPE and OASPA have retained Frontiers as a member after concerns were raised.^[7][8] As of 2021, several Frontiers Media journals were selected for inclusion in the Norwegian Scientific Index (most at level 1, standard academic)^[9] or MEDLINE.^[10]

History[]

The first journal published was Frontiers in Neuroscience, which opened for submission as a beta version in 2007.^[11] In 2010, Frontiers launched a series of another eleven journals in medicine and science. In February 2012, the Frontiers Research Network was launched,^[12] 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.^[13]

In February 2013, the Nature Publishing Group (NPG) (now Nature Research) acquired a controlling interest in Frontiers Media.^[14]

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.^[15][16]

In early September 2014, Frontiers received the ALPSP Gold Award for Innovation in Publishing from the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers.^[17]

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,^[18][19] and Loop soon included a collaboration with ORCID to link and synchronize researcher profile information.^[20] The Technical University of Madrid was the first university to link their Loop profile to their institutional website.^[21]

In 2019, Frontiers joined the Initiative for Open Citations.^[22]

In May 2020, Frontiers Media launched its Artificial Intelligence Review Assistant software to external editors.^[23] The software helps identify conflicts of interest and plagiarism, assesses manuscript and peer review quality, and recommends editors and reviewers.^[23][24] The software does not flag all forms of conflict of interest, such as undisclosed funding sources or affiliations.^[23]

List of journals[]

The Frontiers journals use open peer review, where the names of reviewers of accepted articles are made public.^[25] As of 2017,^[26] 24 of their journals had impact factors. In February 2016, the series contained 54 journals,^[27] a number that grew to more than 80 by 2020.^[28] The collection of all the journals in the series is sometimes considered a megajournal, as is the BioMed Central series.^[27][29][30] Some journals, such as Frontiers in Human Neuroscience^[31] or Frontiers in Microbiology^[32] are considered megajournals on their own. The journals published by Frontiers are:

as well as

Abstracting and indexing[]

The National Publication Committee of Norway has assigned Frontiers Media an institutional-level rating of "level 0" in the Norwegian Scientific Index from 2018 to 2021, indicating that the publisher is "not academic" but it's above level "X" (potentially predatory).^[9] Individual Frontiers journals have separate journal-level ratings. As of 2021, over 60 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 60 have a rating of "level 1" (standard academic) and 3 have a rating of "level 0" (not academic).^[9]

As of 2021, 9 Frontiers Media journals have been selected for inclusion in MEDLINE.^[10]

As for broader databases, Frontiers Media has over 80 journals indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) with a DOAJ seal,^[33] over 40 journals listed in PubMed Central,^[34] and over 50 journals listed in Scopus^[35] and the Web of Science.^[36]

Controversies[]

In April 2013, Frontiers in Psychology retracted a controversial article linking climate change denialism and "conspiracist ideation";^[37] the retraction was itself also controversial and led to the resignations of at least three editors.^[38]

In late September 2014, Frontiers in Public Health published a controversial article that supported HIV denialism; three days later the publisher issued a statement of concern and announced an investigation into the review process of the article.^[39] It was eventually decided that the article would not be retracted but instead was reclassified as an opinion piece.^[40] It has since been retracted.^[41] Collaboration between the Nature Publishing Group and Frontiers ended when the two groups decided in November 2014 "to make a clean separation and never to mention again that [Nature Publishing Group] has some kind of involvement in Frontiers."^[42]

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".^[42]

In June 2015, Retraction Watch referred to the publisher as one with "a history of badly handled and controversial retractions and publishing decisions".^[43]

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".^[44]

In October 2015, Frontiers was added to librarian Jeffrey Beall's list of "Potential, possible, or probable" predatory open-access publishers.^[45][46][11] The inclusion was met with backlash among some researchers.^[45] 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".^[47]

In July 2016 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",^[48] and in October of that year Beall reported that reviewers have called the review process "merely for show".^[49] Beall was subject to much controversy^[50][51][52] and had to pull down his blacklist in January 2017.^[53]

In October 2015, the Committee 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".^[7] Frontiers is a COPE member and one of its employees sits on COPE's council.^[7]

In September 2016, Frontiers demanded that the university where Beall worked force him to retract his claims.^[54][55] Pressure by Frontiers was reported to be a large factor in the controversial shutdown of Beall's List,^[56] something challenged by others associated with the case.^[53]

In November 2016, a paper linking vaccines to autism was retracted from a Frontiers journal.^[57]

In 2017, further editors were removed, allegedly for their rejection rate being high.^[58] In December 2017 Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky wrote in the magazine Nautilus that the acceptance rate of manuscripts in Frontiers journals was reported to be near 90%.^[59]

In 2021, a provisionally accepted controversial paper in Frontiers in Pharmacology on COVID-19 and the use of the antiparasitic drug ivermectin was ultimately rejected by the editors as it contained "unsubstantiated claims and violated the journal's editorial policies". This has drawn anger among the authors of the paper calling the move "censorship".^[60] Retraction Watch notes that this is not the first time Frontiers already provisionally accepted and then rejected a controversial paper.^[61]

References[]

External links[]

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