Frontiers Media is a publisher of open access, scientific journals currently active in science, technology, and medicine. It was founded in 2007 by Kamila and Henry Markram. Frontiers is based in Lausanne, Switzerland, with offices in London, Madrid, Seattle and Brussels. All Frontiers journals are published under a Creative Commons Attribution License. In 2015, Frontiers Media was classified as a possible predatory publisher by Jeffrey Beall (Bloudoff-Indelicato, 2015).

In February 2013, the Nature Publishing Group (NPG) (now Nature Research) acquired a controlling interest in Frontiers Media, however collaboration between the Nature Publishing Group and Frontiers Media ended in 2015, when Frontiers removed 31 editors of Frontiers in Medicine and Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine after the editors complained that the company staff were interfering with editorial decisions and violating core principles of medical publishing (Enserink, 2015).

The editors say Frontiers' publication practices are designed to maximize the company's profits, not the quality of papers, and that this could harm patients. Frederick Fenter, executive editor at Frontiers, says the company had no choice but to fire the entire group because they were holding up the publication of papers until their demands were met. Isn't this a basic principle of the peer review process?

In a 13-page Manifesto of Editorial Independence that was sent to the Frontiers executive board on 23 March and posted online on 8 May, the three editors-in-chief of the two journals, along with 28 "chief editors" — who were responsible for journal sections such as Dermatology, Pathology, and Thrombosis — cited a series of problems in the way that Frontiers in Medicine and Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine are run.

One key issue, the manifesto says, is the power of so-called associate editors, of which each journal has about 150. These are academics who handle the review process and can accept a manuscript — after it has passed muster with two review editors — without any involvement from the editors-in-chief or field editors. (Authors can pick their "preferred" associate editor themselves.) The critics call this process "totally unacceptable" because it sidesteps the editors-in-chief, and a violation of internationally accepted standards. The World Association of Medical Editors (WAME), for instance, says that "Editors-in-chief should have full authority over the editorial content" of their journal.

Jos van der Meer, a former editor-in-chief of Frontiers in Medicine and chief editor of its Infectious Diseases section, says he was sometimes notified about the acceptance of papers that he didn't approve of, or that he felt were handled by the wrong associate editor. (On the other hand, when a paper was rejected, Frontiers would ask him if it was the right decision, he says.) "I realized I had very little to say", Van der Meer says. "I felt like a puppet on a string".

The manifesto also says that Frontiers staff interfere with editorial decisions, for instance by moving manuscripts from one editor to another to accelerate review, inviting authors to write a commentary without the knowledge of editors, and sometimes "deliberately overriding" editorial decisions. The critics also object to a series of special issues put together by guest editors, called Frontiers Research Topics, that get published under their journal's flag even though they had nothing to say about them. The whole system is designed to publish as many papers as possible, says Matthias Barton of the University of Zürich in Switzerland, who was editor-in-chief on both journals.

Frontiers launched its first journal, Frontiers in Neuroscience, in 2008; since then, it has started more than 50 journals — together harboring more than 400 specialty sections — covering everything from physics and chemistry to computer science and social sciences — that together have more than 50,000 academic editors. Kamila Markram serves as the company's CEO, while Henry Markram's official title is Frontiers editor-in-chief — another sore point for the critics, who say that confuses the roles of editor and publisher. In 2021, Frontiers published over 85,000 articles. An increase of 77% compared to 48,000 in 2020. To date, Frontiers has published more than 280,000 articles and author fees for most types of articles are $1900.

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" (Norwegian Scientific Index, 2023).

In June 2015, Retraction Watch referred to the publisher as one with "a history of badly handled and controversial retractions and publishing decisions" (Retraction Watch, 2014a; 2015).

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" (Kaufman & Kaufman, 2018).

In 2017, further editors were removed, allegedly for their rejection rate being high (Schneider, 2018). 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% (Marcus & Oransky, 2017).

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 (Horbach et al., 2022).

The authors wrote:

"Our worries began with the organisation of the peer review process itself. Frontiers forces users into a relatively rigid workflow that foresees contacting a large number of potential reviewers for submissions. Reviewers are selected by an internal artificial intelligence algorithm on the basis of keywords automatically attributed by the algorithm based on the content of the submitted manuscript and matched with a database of potential reviewers, a technique somewhat similar to the one used for reviewer databases of other big publishers. While the importance of the keywords for the match can be manually adjusted, the fit between submissions and the actually required domain expertise to review them is often less than perfect. This would not be a problem were the process of contacting reviewers fully under the control of the editors. Yet the numerous potential reviewers are contacted by means of a preformulated email in a quasi-automated fashion, apparently under the assumption that many of them will reject anyway. We find this to be problematic because it ultimately erodes the willingness of academics to donate their time for unpaid but absolutely vital community service. In addition, in some cases it resulted in reviewers being assigned to papers in our Research Topic that we believed were not qualified to perform reviews. Significant amounts of emailing and back-and-forth with managing editors and Frontiers staff were required to bypass this system, retract review invitations and instead focus only on the reviewers we actually wanted to contact. As it turns out, the editorial management system is so rigidly set up, that even Frontiers’ own staff does not always have the ability to adjust key settings.

Another concern we had is the pacing of the review and publication process. Frontiers aims to avoid unnecessary delays in the reviewing of submissions, a goal we wholeheartedly subscribe to. Yet the intended workflow is such that reviewers have only seven days to complete their reports as a default, with the possibility to extend the deadline to twenty-one days - however, again at the cost of a cumbersome process of emailing with Frontiers staff. Also, automatically generated review invitations as described above are sent out if the editors do not send out sufficiently many review invitations themselves within three days, including weekends, holidays and (as was the case with us) summer breaks. While we see how short deadlines can contribute to fast dissemination, we feel that the current standards might jeopardize the quality of the review process.

A third element of the rigidly organised review process we found to be a mixed blessing concerns the level of editorial control that editors maintain. In fact, editors are encouraged to accept manuscripts as soon as they receive two recommendations for publication by reviewers (regardless of how many other reviewers recommend rejection). This holds for all review rounds. Especially in combination with the factors mentioned above, i.e. potentially unqualified reviewers being invited and high requirements on review speed, this potentially creates additional challenges to the quality of the editorial process."

In January 2023, Zhejiang Gongshang University in Hangzhou, China, announced (translation here) it would no longer include articles published in Hindawi, MDPI, and Frontiers journals when evaluating researcher performance. We have a special report on MDPI predatory practices you can read here.

A systematic reduction in the Impact Factor (IF) of journals published by Frontiers Media was carried out in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) 2023 (which presents the result for the year 2022).

Of the 51 Frontiers' journals that had an IF in 2021, only 3 had an increase. The other 48 journals had an average reduction of 15.3% in the IF. This shows a pattern that is forming in the scientific community around publishers known for their predatory practices.