Country of origin Switzerland Key people Kamila Markram, CEO | Headquarters location Lausanne Founded 2007 | |
Parent company Holtzbrinck Publishing Group Publication types Open access scientific journals Fiction genres Medicine, life sciences, technology Founders Kamila Markram, Henry Markram Similar PLOS, Crossref, Society for Neuroscience, Max Planck Society, National Academy of Sciences Profiles | ||
Frontiers Media SA is an academic publisher of peer-reviewed open 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 the EPFL Innovation Park of the Lausanne campus in Switzerland.
Contents
Frontiers Media has, controversially, been included in Jeffrey Beall's list of potential predatory open access publishers and has been accused of using email spam. The publisher has "a history of badly handled and controversial retractions and publishing decisions". Nevertheless, both COPE and OASPA have stated that they have no concerns with Frontiers' membership of their organizations.
Journals
The first journal published was Frontiers in Neuroscience, which opened for submission as a beta version in 2007, and for official submissions in January 2008. In 2010, Frontiers launched a series of another eleven journals in medicine and science.
In 2008, Frontiers was the very first publisher to introduce article-level metrics.
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.
According to Frontiers 2014 Progress Report, they now have 52 open access journals, and as of 2015, 16 of their journals had impact factors.
In 2014, Frontiers received the ALPSP Gold Award for Innovation in Publishing from the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers.
Frontiers journals use open peer review, where the names of reviewers of accepted articles are made public.
Frontiers for Young Minds
Frontiers for Young Minds was launched in November 2013 during the Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. It is a web-based science journal that involves young people in the review of scientific articles with the help of scientists who act as mentors.
Loop
In 2015, Frontiers launched Loop, a research network that is open to be integrated into any publisher’s or academic organization's website. At the time of launch the platform was integrated into two publishing platforms, Nature Publishing Group and Frontiers. Since then, the Technical University of Madrid became the first university to link their Loop profile to their institutional website and in October Loop collaborated with ORCID to link and synchronize researcher profile information.
Business model and partnerships
According to their website, the company "operates the open-access publishing on an author-pay business model, but has a commercial mandate to develop multiple revenue streams that can be used to support open-access publishing, as well as a technology mandate to ensure that scientists benefit from cutting edge IT technologies."
In 2013, Frontiers received a major investment from Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, the holding company of Nature Publishing Group. The investment spurred collaboration with Nature Publishing Group, such as the integration of Loop profiles into Nature journals on nature.com, as well as collaboration with other Holtzbrinck companies such as the Frontiers for Young Minds blog on Scientific American. Though Holtzbrinck still has a minority share in Frontiers, the two companies operate independently, and in 2014, the two groups "made the decision ... to make a clean separation and never to mention again that [Nature Publishing Group] has some kind of involvement in Frontiers."
Controversies
In 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 2014, Frontiers in Public Health published a controversial article that supported HIV denialism; the publisher later 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. In May 2015, Frontiers removed 31 editors from the boards of two medical journals. These editors had held up the review process in response to what they perceived as "company staff...interfering with editorial decisions and violating core principles of medical publishing", which they claimed was done to maximize company profits, possibly at the expense of patient health. Frontiers has disputed these claims, citing that these editors had banded together under flag of one field chief editor with the aim to "change [Frontiers'] fundamental principle of distributed editorial decision-making during peer-review."
In 2015, Frontiers was added to Jeffrey Beall's list of "Potential, possible, or probable" predatory open-access publishers. 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." Frontiers retracted the chemtrail conspiracy theory article mentioned by Beall, and found that the complaints were valid and the article did "not meet the standards of editorial and scientific soundness". Reviewers have called the review process "merely for show". and further articles have been retracted because of reviewing deficiencies. Since then, rather than improving the review process, Frontiers tries to discredit Beall at his employer.
The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) has said "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.