Tags
Frontiers Media, Jeffrey Beall, Nature Publishing Group, Open-access science publishing, Science Publishing, Springer Nature
- Unquestionably, Frontiers is for-profit.
- The Nature Publishing Group (NPG), one of the world’s most prominent for-profit science publishing companies, became majority stakeholder in Frontiers Media in 2013.
- Frontiers themselves detail this interest on their web-site (see figure below).
- In May 2015, NPG formally concluded its merger with Springer Science, another German for-profit publishing house (Completed merger forms ‘Springer Nature’).
- The new media entity is called Springer Nature.
- Problem now is the nature and extent of NPG’s stake in Frontiers remains murky to say the least.
- The figure below shows the hierarchy of owners.
- Jeffrey Beall publishes a much-dreaded annual list of predatory open-access scientific publishers.
- Posting about Frontiers at least once on his blog, he doesn’t go so far as to say they’re predatory but does highlight questionable practices such as spamming and arguably loose editorial practices, I get complaints about Frontiers
Frontiers is a for-profit open-access science journal publisher that seems to have some teething problems
- According to two blog posts, Frontiers appears to have a ‘pyramidal’ review structure, designed to maximize scientist participation in the article submission process by roping them into their ecosystem through the review process.
- One of them, Ugo Bardi, a scientist, once reviewed for Frontiers before resigning.
- He estimates, ‘The whole system may count, probably, tens of thousands of scientists‘ (“Recursive Fury:” the reasons of Frontiers’ blunder).
- This particular blog post makes crystal-clear that Frontiers is indeed for-profit.
- Bardi’s blog post also references Frontiers in Psychology’s decision to retract an intensively-viewed psychology article authored by Stephen Lewandowsky et al, not for scientific or ethical but for legal concerns (fear of libel and/or defamation) that in due course turned out to have been unfounded.
- The article in question was a textual analysis of blog comments. It purported to understand and/or reveal the conspiratorial mindset of climate contrarians (Contrarians bully journal into retracting a climate psychology paper | Dana Nuccitelli).
- Almost a year later, another open-access journal called the Journal of Social and Political Psychology published the article (not the same but revised) in full, Recurrent Fury: Conspiratorial Discourse in the Blogosphere Triggered by Research on the Role of Conspiracist Ideation in Climate Denial
- Roger Jones, a climatologist, details the problems with Frontiers’ decision to retract this article, Page on wordpress.com
- In a separate issue, in May 2015, Frontiers sacked 31 editors in Frontiers in Medicine and Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine.
- Covering this story, Science magazine writes, ‘the editors say Frontiers’ publication practices are designed to maximize the company’s profits‘, Open-access publisher sacks 31 editors amid fierce row over independence.
- The article also details confusion on the nature and extent of NPG’s stake in Frontiers, ‘NPG’s name initially helped attract many associate editors to Frontiers, Barton says. Although he was asked at some point to stop using the NPG logo on letters, he was never told what happened, he says. Fenter acknowledges there is “confusion” about the collective marketing. The Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, which owns Macmillan, still has a minority share in Frontiers, but the two are operating independently, Fenter says. “We made the decision about 6 months ago to make a clean separation and never to mention again that [NPG] has some kind of involvement in Frontiers‘.
- Here is Frontiers’s point-by-point rebuttal of the sacked editors’ claims, Frontiers acts to defend distributed editorial independence
https://www.quora.com/Is-Frontiers-a-non-profit-or-a-for-profit-publisher/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala
Richard Poynder said:
See also an interview with Frontiers’ Kamila Markram here : http://bit.ly/28IE9ZV
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Tirumalai Kamala said:
Thanks for sharing. Useful to know about other Open Access journal lists like https://doaj.org/.
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Plantarum said:
Dr. Kamala, an interesting perspective. What evidence is there, if any, that this is a non-profit organization? I am trying to understand why this option even exists in your title.
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Tirumalai Kamala said:
On this blog I cross-post my answers to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quora questions. This is why I end each post with the link to the original Quora content.
In this case someone asked me to answer this particular question.
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Leonid Schneider said:
Frontiers is owned entirely by Holtzbrinck, though the founders Henry and Kamila Markram retained the company control.
Academic chief editors are incited by contract to publish a certain number of papers to retain their position and salary. Rejections of manuscripts must be suggested by all reviewers unanimously and approved by chief editors, handling editors have no influence once a manuscript was sent out for peer review. It suffices that only one reviewer recommends acceptance to induce potentially endless rounds of peer reviewing. Authors generally select their own handling editors, occasionally editors and reviewers act widely outside their professional field of qualifications.
https://forbetterscience.wordpress.com/2016/02/15/oa-publishers-hindawi-vs-frontiers-similar-yet-different/
For more information on Frontiers, visit my website https://forbetterscience.wordpress.com/tag/frontiers/
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Greta said:
https://forbetterscience.wordpress.com/2016/04/21/fear-and-loathing-at-frontiers
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Janos Toth said:
I recently discovered a ‘Frontiers’ account on Scribd with thousands of uploaded articles publihed NOT in Frontiers journals. All seems to be open access/freely available articles, but one would question why a legit scientific publisher would republish other publishers’ content; in fact I think it is pretty unheard of?!
https://www.scribd.com/publisher/47197814/Frontiers
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Tirumalai Kamala said:
Thank you for sharing that useful link. I agree it does appear strange. I just checked out a couple of papers at that site at random and they weren’t available for free from their original publishers’ web-site though they were available for free from other sources. I applaud you for unearthing and sharing this site, yet another mysterious brick in the Frontiers open-access model.
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