Editorial concerns In May 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". In total 31 editors were removed. Following this incident,
Nature Publishing Group ended its collaboration with Frontiers with the intent "never to mention again that Nature Publishing Group has some kind of involvement in Frontiers". 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". However, as of 2022, Frontiers maintains that reviewers are given the option to reject papers with specific recommendations. In 2017, further editors were removed, allegedly for their rejection rate being high. 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%. 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. In January 2023,
Zhejiang Gongshang University () in Hangzhou, China, announced it would no longer include articles published in
Hindawi,
MDPI, and Frontiers journals when evaluating researcher performance. Also in January 2023,
Inria released recommendations on "grey-zone publishers", namely Frontiers and MDPI, highlighting stark differences in editorial process between titles owned by Frontiers and other journals in the fields of Computer Science and Mathematics, and urging "extreme vigilance about the quality of articles published by Frontiers." In 2024, a study highlighted how MDPI, Frontiers, and Hindawi journals had massively increased their publishing of special issue articles, associated with very rapid article acceptances. This has raised concerns over the quality of the Frontiers peer review process.
Inclusion in Beall's list In October 2015, Frontiers was added to
Beall's List of "Potential, possible, or probable"
predatory open-access publishers. The inclusion was met with backlash among some researchers. 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". 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". and in October of that year Beall reported that reviewers have called the review process "merely for show". In September 2016, Frontiers demanded that the university where Beall worked force him to retract his claims. Beall deleted his blacklist in January 2017. Pressure by Frontiers was reported to be a large factor in the controversial shutdown of Beall's List. the retraction was itself also controversial and led to the resignations of at least three editors. 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. It was eventually decided that the article would not be retracted but instead was reclassified as an opinion piece. It has since been retracted. 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. 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".
Retraction Watch noted that this was not the first time Frontiers provisionally accepted and then rejected a controversial paper. 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. 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. 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. A now-retracted 2024 paper published in
Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology was criticized for having
figures AI generated with
Midjourney, described as featuring "garbled text and a wildly incorrect diagram of a rat penis". 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". == References ==