In 2015, Frontiers Media was classified as a possible predatory publisher by Jeffrey Beall,[8] though Beall's list was taken offline two years later[9] in a decision that remains controversial.
History
The first journal published was Frontiers in Neuroscience, which opened for submission as a beta version in 2007.[citation needed] In 2010, Frontiers launched a series of another 11 journals in medicine and science. In February 2012, the Frontiers Research Network was launched,[10] 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.[11]
In February 2013, the Nature Publishing Group (NPG) (now Nature Research) acquired a controlling interest in Frontiers Media,[12] however collaboration between the Nature Publishing Group and Frontiers ended in 2015.[13]
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.[14][15]
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,[17][18] and Loop soon included a collaboration with ORCID to link and synchronize researcher profile information.[19] The Technical University of Madrid was the first university to link their Loop profile to their institutional website.[20]
In May 2020, Frontiers Media launched its Artificial Intelligence Review Assistant software to external editors.[22] The software helps identify conflicts of interest and plagiarism, assesses manuscript and peer review quality, and recommends editors and reviewers,[22][23] although the software does not flag all forms of conflict of interest, such as undisclosed funding sources or affiliations.[22]
The Frontiers journals use open peer review, where the names of reviewers of accepted articles are made public.[25]
In February 2016, the series contained 54 journals,[26] a number that grew to more than 80 by 2020.[27] The collection of all the journals in the series is sometimes considered a megajournal, as is the BioMed Central series.[26][28][29] Some journals, such as Frontiers in Human Neuroscience[30] or Frontiers in Microbiology[31] are considered megajournals on their own. The journals published by Frontiers are:
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",[32] 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).[32]
In June 2015, Retraction Watch referred to the publisher as one with "a history of badly handled and controversial retractions and publishing decisions".[39]
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".[40] However, as of 2022, Frontiers maintains that reviewers are given the option to reject papers with specific recommendations.[41]
In 2017, further editors were removed, allegedly for their rejection rate being high.[citation needed] 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%.[42]
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.[43]
In January 2023, Zhejiang Gongshang University (浙江工商大学) in Hangzhou, China, announced it would no longer include articles published in Hindawi, MDPI, and Frontiers journals when evaluating researcher performance.[44][45]
Inclusion in Beall's list
In October 2015, Frontiers was added to Beall's List of "Potential, possible, or probable" predatory open-access publishers.[46][47] The inclusion was met with backlash among some researchers.[46] 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 "[h]aving a single influential individual cast doubt on such a huge journal feels very unfair".[48] At the time, 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".[49] 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".[49] 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.[49]
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",[50] and in October of that year Beall reported that reviewers have called the review process "merely for show".[51]
In September 2016, Frontiers demanded that the university where Beall worked force him to retract his claims.[52][53] Beall deleted his blacklist in January 2017.[54] Pressure by Frontiers was reported to be a large factor in the controversial shutdown of Beall's List.[53]
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.[57] It was eventually decided that the article would not be retracted but instead was reclassified as an opinion piece.[58] It has since been retracted.[59]
In November 2016, a paper in Frontiers in Public Health linking vaccines 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.[60]
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 drew anger from the authors of the paper, who called the move "censorship".[61]Retraction Watch noted that this was not the first time Frontiers provisionally accepted and then rejected a controversial paper.[62]
A study published in Frontiers in Virology in February 2022 said that Moderna had patented a 19 nucleotide genetic sequence uniquely matching a part of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein three years prior to the pandemic, arguing it was evidence that the virus was manufactured as part of a lab leak conspiracy.[63][64] 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.[64][65] Craig Wilen, an immunobiology professor of the Yale School of Medicine, likened the study to "complete garbage" and a "conspiracy theory" rather than legitimate research.[63][66]
This widely-mocked figure was captioned as "Spermatogonial stem cells, isolated, purified and cultured from rat testes".
A now-retracted 2024 paper published in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology[67] was criticized for having figures AI generated with Midjourney, described as featuring "garbled text and a wildly incorrect diagram of a rat penis".[68][69] Microbiologist and scientific integrity consultant Elisabeth 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".[68]
^ abSpezi, Valerie; Wakeling, Simon; Pinfield, Stephen; Creaser, Claire; Fry, Jenny; Willett, Peter (2017). "Open-access mega-journals: The future of scholarly communication or academic dumping ground? A review"(PDF). Journal of Documentation. 73 (2): 263–283. doi:10.1108/JD-06-2016-0082. Archived(PDF) from the original on 27 November 2018. Retrieved 20 February 2019. Series, such as the BMC Series ... or Frontiers 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.
^"Journals A-Z". Frontiers Media. Archived from the original on 25 May 2020. Retrieved 2 June 2020.
^Domnina, T. N. (2016). "A megajournal as a new type of scientific publication". Scientific and Technical Information Processing. 43 (4): 241–250. doi:10.3103/S0147688216040079. S2CID17769019.
^company, Web of Science Group, a Clarivate. "Web of Science Master Journal List". Web of Science Group, a Clarivate company. Archived from the original on 20 June 2020. Retrieved 23 November 2022.((cite web)): CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
^Kaufman, Allison B.; Kaufman, James C. (2018). Pseudoscience: The Conspiracy Against Science. MIT Press. p. 292. ISBN9780262037426. Archived from the original on 17 February 2024. Retrieved 17 October 2020. 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.
^Schneider, Leonid (14 September 2016). "Beall-listed Frontiers empire strikes back". For Better Science. Archived from the original on 27 November 2016. Retrieved 26 November 2016. Frontiers disagrees with this librarian's privately held views, the publisher demands of his academic employer to impose disciplinary measures or coercion against Beall.
