Frontiers Media SA is a publisher of peer-reviewedopen access scientific journals currently active in science, technology, and medicine. It was founded in 2007 by a group of neuroscientists, 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. All Frontiers journals are published under a Creative Commons Attribution License. In 2015 Frontiers Media was controversially included in Jeffrey Beall's list of potential predatory open access publishers and has been accused of using email spam. Retraction Watch refers to the publisher as one with "a history of badly handled and controversial retractions and publishing decisions". Nevertheless, both COPE and OASPA have retained Frontiers as a member after concerns were raised. It is also part of the Initiative for Open Citations.
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 eleven 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. 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 in collaboration with NPG 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.
List of journals
The Frontiers journals use open peer review, where the names of reviewers of accepted articles are made public. As of 2017, 24 of their journals had impact factors. In February 2016, the series contained 54 journals, a number that grew to 84 by 2020. 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.
Controversies
In April 2013, Frontiers in Psychology retracted a controversial article linking climate change denialism and "conspiracist ideation"; the retraction was itself also controversial and led to the resignations of at least three editors. In November 2013 an article in SciELO reported a rejection rate of 20% of manuscripts, compared to Nature which rejected 90% of them, but also noted that Frontiers in Pharmacology of Anti-Cancer Drugs did not fall for the 2013 Science sting. 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. It was eventually decided that the article would not be retracted but instead was reclassified as an opinion piece. Around November 2014 the collaboration between NPG and Frontiers quietly ended when the two groups "made the decision... to make a clean separation and never to mention again that has some kind of involvement in Frontiers." 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 October 2015, Frontiers was added to Jeffrey Beall's list of "Potential, possible, or probable" predatory open-access publishers. The inclusion was met with backlash amongst some researchers. 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", and in October of that year Beall reported that reviewers have called the review process "merely for show". In October 2015 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 is a COPE member and one of its employees sits on COPE's council. In September 2016 Frontiers demanded that the university where Beall worked force him to retract his claims. In November 2016 a paper linking vaccines to autism was retracted from a Frontiers journal. Also in November 2016, a study published analyzing predatory publishing by gathering datasets with and without Frontiers journals. In 2017, further editors were removed, allegedly for their rejection rate being high. A study published in eLife in November 2017 showed that "women are underrepresented in the peer-review process", and that "editors of both genders operate with substantial same-gender preference". 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%. According to Allison and James Kaufman in the 2018 book , "Frontiers has used an in-house journals management software that does not give reviewers the option to recommend the rejection of manuscripts" and that the "system is setup to make it almost impossible to reject papers".
Norwegian Science Index
The National Publication Committee of Norway has assigned Frontiers Media an institutional-level rating of "level 0" in the Norwegian Scientific Index since 2018. Individual Frontiers journals have separate journal-level ratings. As of 2020, 56 Frontiers journals are listed in the Norwegian Scientific Index of which 3 have a rating of "level 2", 50 have a rating of "level 1" and 3 have a rating of "level 0".
