Frontiers in... journal series
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Frontiers in... is a series of open-access academic journal published by Frontiers Media since 2007. Since then, the series expanded to 59 journals. The series uses open peer review, where the names of reviewers of accepted articles are made public, but opinions are divided about the quality of the journals and whether or not they constitute predatory publishing.
History
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.[1] In 2010, Frontiers launched a series of another eleven journals in medicine and science, and the series kept expanding since. In February 2016, the series contained 54 journals,[2] a number that grew to 59 by 2017.
In 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".[3]
Quality and impact
As of 2015,[4] 16 of their journals had impact factors, a number that grew to 24 in 2017. Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky wrote in the magazine Nautilus that the acceptance rate of manuscripts in Frontiers journals is reported to be near 90%.[5] SciELO reports a rejection rate of 20% of manuscripts, compared to Nature which rejects 90% of them, but also notes that Frontiers in Pharmacology of Anti-Cancer Drugs did not fall for the 2013 Science sting.[6] According to Allison and James Kaufman in the 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 that the "system is setup to make it almost impossible to reject papers".[7] Journals in the series however, had to issue retraction for a paper linking vaccines to autism[8] and have published a paper on HIV denialism, which has been reclassified as 'opinion' rather than be retracted.[9]
The series and its publisher have often been criticized for predatory practices,[10] having appeared on Beall's list before it was taken down.[11] The inclusion of Frontiers journals on Beall's list was met with backlash amongst some researchers.[12] Some researchers analyze predatory publishing by taking dataset with and without Frontiers journals.[13]
The open peer review nature of the series allows for studies of gender bias in peer review. A 2017 study published in eLife showed that "women are underrepresented in the peer-review process", and that "editors of both genders operate with substantial same-gender preference".[14]
List of journals
The collection of all the journals in the series is sometimes considered a megajournal, as is the BioMed Central series.[2][15][16] Some journals, such as Frontiers in Human Neuroscience[17] or Frontiers in Microbiology[18] are considered megajournals on their own.
- Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience
- Frontiers in Applied Mathematics and Statistics
- Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences
- Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience
- Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology
- Frontiers in Built Environment
- Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine
- Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology
- Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology
- Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience
- Frontiers in Chemistry
- Frontiers in Communication
- Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience
- Frontiers in Digital Humanities
- Frontiers in Earth Science
- Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution
- Frontiers in Education
- Frontiers in Endocrinology
- Frontiers in Energy Research
- Frontiers in Environmental Science
- Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience
- Frontiers in Genetics
- Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
- Frontiers in ICT
- Frontiers in Immunology
- Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience
- Frontiers in Marine Science
- Frontiers in Materials
- Frontiers in Mechanical Engineering
- Frontiers in Medicine
- Frontiers in Microbiology
- Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences
- Frontiers in Molecular Neuroscience
- Frontiers in Neural Circuits
- Frontiers in Neuroanatomy
- Frontiers in Neuroenergetics
- Frontiers in Neuroengineering
- Frontiers in Neuroinformatics
- Frontiers in Neurology
- Frontiers in Neurorobotics
- Frontiers in Neuroscience
- Frontiers in Nutrition
- Frontiers in Oncology
- Frontiers in Pediatrics
- Frontiers in Pharmacology
- Frontiers in Physics
- Frontiers in Physiology
- Frontiers in Plant Science
- Frontiers in Psychiatry
- Frontiers in Psychology
- Frontiers in Public Health
- Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics
- Frontiers in Robotics and AI
- Frontiers in Sociology
- Frontiers in Surgery
- Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems
- Frontiers in Synaptic Neuroscience
- Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
- Frontiers in Veterinary Science
References
- ^ "About Frontiers: History". Frontiers Media. Retrieved 14 March 2018.
- ^ a b Spezi, 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". Journal of Documentation. 73 (2): 263–283. doi:10.1108/JD-06-2016-0082.
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.
- ^ Enserink, Martin (20 May 2015). "Open-access publisher sacks 31 editors amid fierce row over independence". Science. doi:10.1126/science.aac4629.
- ^ "Journal Impact Factor 2014". CiteFactor. Retrieved 2015-12-24.
- ^ Marcus, Adam; Oransky, Ivan (7 December 2017). "Why Garbage Science Gets Published". Nautilus.
- ^ Nassi-Calò, Lilian (5 November 2013). "Controversial Article in The Journal "Science" exposes the weaknesses of Peer-Review in a set of Open Access Journals". SciELO in Perspective.
- ^ Kaufman, Allison B.; Kaufman, James C. (2018). Pseudoscience: The Conspiracy Against Science. MIT Press. p. 292. ISBN 9780262037426.
- ^ Chawla, Dalmeet Singh (2016-11-28). "Study linking vaccines to autism pulled following heavy criticism". Retraction Watch. Retrieved 2018-03-14.
- ^ Ferguson, Cat (24 February 2015). "Frontiers lets HIV denial article stand, reclassifies it as "opinion"". Retraction Watch.
- ^ Schneider, Leonid (28 October 2015). "Is Frontiers a potential predatory publisher?". For Better Science. Retrieved 2017-03-14.
- ^ Basken, Paul (12 September 2017). "Why Beall's List Died — and What It Left Unresolved About Open Access". The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved 2017-03-14.
- ^ Bloudoff-Indelicato, Mollie (23 October 2015). "Backlash after Frontiers journals added to list of questionable publishers". Nature. 526 (7575): 613–613. doi:10.1038/526613f.
- ^ Savina, Tatiana; Sterligov, Ivan (24 November 2016). "Prevalence of Potentially Predatory Publishing in Scopus on the Country Level" (PDF). Ural Federal University. Retrieved 15 March 2018.
- ^ Helmer, Markus; Schottdorf, Manuel; Neef, Andreas; Battaglia, Demian (21 March 2017). "Gender bias in scholarly peer review". eLife. 6. doi:10.7554/elife.21718.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link) - ^ 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.
- ^ Binfield, Peter (2013-12-17). "Novel scholarly journal concepts". In Bartling, S.; Friesike, S. (eds.). Opening Science. Springer Science+Business Media. pp. 155–163. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-00026-8_10. ISBN 978-3-319-00025-1.
- ^ Ware, Mark; Mabe, Michael (2015). "The STM Report: An overview of scientific and scholarly journal publishing" (PDF). International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers.
- ^ Schloss, Patrick D.; Johnston, Mark; Casadevall, Arturo (2017-09-26). "Support science by publishing in scientific society journals". mBio. 8 (5). American Society for Microbiology: e01633-17. doi:10.1128/mBio.01633-17. PMID 28951482.
Further reading
- Gross, Alan G.; Buehl, Jonathan (2016). "Speed: The eruption of authorizing sites". Science and the Internet: Communicating Knowledge in a Digital Age. Routledge. ISBN 9781351864022.