Frontiers

Frontiers
Title	Frontiers
Discipline	Multidisciplinary
Publisher	Frontiers Media
Country	Switzerland
Firstdate	2007
Frequency	Continuous

Frontiers is an open-access publishing group and family of scholarly journals founded in 2007 by researchers and entrepreneurs in Lausanne, Switzerland. It operates a portfolio of specialty titles spanning the natural sciences, social sciences, engineering, and medicine, and is known for its article processing charge model, online platform, and participatory peer-review workflow. Frontiers journals publish original research, reviews, and editorials and engage research communities through editorial boards, specialty sections, and thematic research topics.

Overview

Frontiers journals cover disciplines represented by institutions such as École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, University of Oxford, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford University, and attract submissions from authors affiliated with organizations like Max Planck Society, Chinese Academy of Sciences, National Institutes of Health, University of Tokyo, and University of Cambridge. The publisher collaborates with societies and funders including Wellcome Trust, European Research Council, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Human Frontier Science Program, and World Health Organization. Frontiers platforms host specialty sections that are overseen by editorial board members drawn from universities such as University of California, Berkeley, University of Melbourne, Peking University, Imperial College London, and ETH Zurich.

History and Development

Frontiers was established by researchers associated with EPFL and early leadership with links to École Polytechnique, expanding through partnerships and acquisitions that connected it to stakeholders including Nature Publishing Group-era editors and entrepreneurs. It grew alongside other Open Access pioneers like Public Library of Science and BioMed Central, amid debates involving publishers such as Elsevier and Springer Nature. Frontiers’ expansion included launches of flagship titles in areas comparable to journals run by Cell Press, The Lancet, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Science Advances. Over time it developed editorial policies influenced by practices observed at Royal Society Publishing, Wiley-Blackwell, and Oxford University Press.

Academic and Publishing Model

Frontiers employs article processing charges similar to models used by PLOS, BMC, and other open-access publishers, with fees paid by authors, institutions, or funders such as Wellcome Trust and National Science Foundation. The platform integrates online editorial management analogous to systems used by Editorial Manager, ScholarOne, and in-house workflows found at IEEE publications. Frontiers journals emphasize rapid dissemination comparable to preprint servers like arXiv, bioRxiv, and medRxiv, while also providing curated collections resembling special issues from publishers such as Taylor & Francis and Cambridge University Press. Partnerships with indexing services link Frontiers content to aggregators including PubMed Central, Web of Science, and Scopus.

Editorial Structure and Peer Review

Editorial leadership at Frontiers comprises chief editors, specialty section editors, and associate editors drawn from universities and institutes such as Columbia University, Yale University, Johns Hopkins University, Karolinska Institutet, and University of Toronto. The peer review workflow uses an interactive, collaborative system that allows reviewers and authors to communicate on the platform, a process compared to dialogic review experiments at F1000Research and consultative models trialed by eLife. Reviewers are selected from networks including academicians affiliated with University of Chicago, Uppsala University, Sorbonne University, Seoul National University, and McGill University. Decisions are made by handling editors and chief editors; editorial appointments often involve recommendations from editorial board members who are leaders in fields represented by awards like the Nobel Prize, Fields Medal, Lasker Award, Turing Award, and Breakthrough Prize.

Impact, Metrics, and Controversies

Frontiers journals are indexed in citation databases and measured by metrics such as citations tracked by Clarivate Analytics, article-level metrics similar to those promoted by Altmetric, and usage statistics monitored by institutional repositories like Europe PMC. Some Frontiers titles have achieved impact indicators comparable to established journals run by Nature Publishing Group and Oxford University Press, while others remain in emerging index tiers like new journals added to Scopus. The organization has been subject to criticism and controversy concerning editorial independence and peer-review rigor, with debates echoing controversies involving OMICS International and editorial disputes seen in the history of Frontiers-like controversies in scholarly publishing. Investigations and commentaries published in outlets such as Science, Nature, The Lancet, and opinion pieces in outlets like The Guardian and The New York Times have examined Frontiers’ practices, leading to responses from the publisher and changes in policies similar to corrective actions taken by Elsevier and Wiley in past disputes.

Notable Journals and Subject Areas

Frontiers' portfolio includes titles in fields comparable to flagship journals like Nature Neuroscience, The Lancet Neurology, Journal of Clinical Investigation, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, and Physical Review Letters in scope. Prominent Frontiers journals include those covering neuroscience, psychology, immunology, microbiology, oncology, artificial intelligence, robotics, environmental science, and translational medicine, attracting editors from centers such as Salk Institute, Broad Institute, Pasteur Institute, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Roslin Institute. Subject areas are organized into specialty sections akin to the topical structures of Annual Review of Neuroscience, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, and Nature Climate Change.

Category:Academic publishing