Lately it seems like the rising tide is going against Frontiers. Originally hailed as a revolutionary open-access publishing model, the publishing group has been subject to intense criticism in recent years. Recent issues include being placed on Beall’s controversial ‘predatory publisher list‘, multiple high profile disputes at the editorial level, and controversy over HIV and vaccine denialist articles published in the journal seemingly without peer review. As a proud author of two Frontiers articles and former frequent reviewer, these issues compounded with a general poor perception of the journal recently led me to stop all publication activities at Frontiers outlets. Although the official response from Frontiers to these issues has been mixed, yesterday a mass-email from a section editor caught my eye:
Dear Review Editors, Dear friends and colleagues,
As some of you may know, Prof. Philippe Schyns recently stepped down from his role as Specialty Chief Editor in Frontiersin Perception Science, and I have been given the honor and responsibility of succeeding him into this function. I wish to extend to him my thanks and appreciation for the hard work he has put in building this journal from the ground up. I will strive to continue his work and maintain Frontiers in Perception Science as one of the primary journals of the field. This task cannot be achieved without the support of a dynamic team of Associate Editors, Review Editors and Reviewers, and I am grateful for all your past, and hopefully future efforts in promoting the journal.
It am aware that many scientists in our community have grown disappointed or even defiant of the Frontiers publishing model in general, and Frontiers in Perception Science is no exception here. Among the foremost concerns are the initial annoyance and ensuing disinterest produced by the automated editor/reviewer invitation system and its spam-like messages, the apparent difficulty in rejecting inappropriate manuscripts, and (perhaps as a corollary), the poor reputation of the journal, a journal to which many authors still hesitate before submitting their work. I have experienced these troubles myself, and it was only after being thoroughly reassured by the Editorial office on most of these counts that I accepted to get involved as Specialty Chief Editor. Frontiers is revising their system, which will now leave more time for Associate Editors to mandate Review Editors before sending out automated invitations. When they occur, automated RE invitations will be targeted to the most relevant people (based on keyword descriptors), rather than broadcast to the entire board. This implies that it is very important for each of you to spend a few minutes editing the Expertise keywords on your Loop profile page. Most of these keywords were automatically collected within your publications, and they may not reflect your true area of expertise. Inappropriate expertise keywords are one of the main reasons why you receive inappropriate reviewing invitations! In the new Frontiers system, article rejection options will be made more visible to the handling Associate Editor. Although my explicit approval is still required for any manuscript rejection, I personally vow to stand behind all Associate Editors who will be compelled to reject poor-quality submissions. (While perceived impact cannot be used as a rejection criterion, poor research or writing quality and objective errors in design, analysis or interpretation can and should be used as valid causes for rejection). I hope that these measures will help limit the demands on the reviewers’ time, and contribute to advancing the standards and reputation of Frontiers in Perception Science. Each of you can also play a part in this effort by continuing to review articles that fall into your area of expertise, and by submitting your own work to the journal.
I look forward to working with all of you towards establishing Frontiers in Perception Science as a high-standard journal for our community.
It seems Frontiers is indeed aware of the problems and is hoping to bring back wary reviewers and authors. But is it too little too late? Discussing the problems at Frontiers is often met with severe criticism or outright dismissal by proponents of the OA publishing system, but I felt these neglected a wider negative perception of the publisher that has steadily grown over the past 5 years. To get a better handle on this I asked my twitter followers what they thought. 152 persons responded as follows:
Frontiers says they are “revising their [review] system”. Do you feel Frontiers has a serious quality problem?
— Micah Allen (@neuroconscience) January 14, 2016
As some of you requested control questions, here are a few for comparison:
As requested, a control question: Do you feel PLOS ONE has a serious quality problem?
— Micah Allen (@neuroconscience) January 15, 2016
That is a stark difference between the two top open access journals – whereas only 19% said there was no problem at Frontiers, a full 50% say there is no problem at PLOS ONE. I think we can see that even accounting for general science skepticism, opinions of Frontiers are particularly negative.
Sam Schwarzkopf also lent some additional data, comparing the whole field of major open access outlets – Frontiers again comes out poorly, although strangely so does F1000:
Which broad-scale open science journal do you think publishes the lowest quality papers? @lakens @neuroconscience
— Sam Schwarzkopf (@sampendu) January 15, 2016
These data confirm what I had already feared: public perception among scientists (insofar as we can infer anything from such a poll) is lukewarm at best. Frontiers has a serious perception problem. Only 19% of 121 respondents were willing to outright say there was no problem at the journal. A full 45% said there was a serious problem, and 36% were unsure. Of course to fully evaluate these numbers, we’d like to know the baserate of similiar responses for other journals, but I cannot imagine any Frontiers author, reviewer, or editor feeling joy at these numbers – I certainly do not. Furthermore they reflect a widespread negativity I hear frequently from colleagues across the UK and Denmark.
What underlies this negative perception? As many proponents point out, Frontiers has been actually quite diligent at responding to user complaints. Controversial papers have been put immediately under review, overly spammy-review invitations and special issue invites largely ceased, and so on. I would argue the issue is not any one single mistake on the part of Frontiers leadership, but a growing history of errors contributing to a perception that the journal is following a profit-led ‘publish anything’ model. At times the journal feels totally automated, within little human care given to publishing and extremely high fees. What are some of the specific complaints I regularly hear from colleagues?
Spammy special issue invites. An older issue, but at Frontier’s inception many authors were inundated with constant invites to special issues, many of which were only tangentially related to author’s specialties.
Spammy review invites. Colleagues who signed on to be ‘Review Editors’ (basically repeat reviewers) reported being hit with as many as 10 requests to review in a month, again many without relevance to their interest
Related to both of the above, a perception that special issues and articles are frequently reviewed by close colleagues with little oversight. Similiarly, many special issues were edited by junior researchers at the PhD level.
Endless review. I’ve heard numerous complaints that even fundamentally flawed or unpublishable papers are impossible or difficult to reject. Reviewers report going through multiple rounds of charitable review, finding the paper only gets worse and worse, only to be removed from the review by editors and the paper published without them.
Again, Frontiers has responded to each of these issues in various ways. For example, Frontiers originally defended the special issues, saying that they were intended to give junior researchers an outlet to publish their ideas. Fair enough, and the spam issues have largely ceased. Still, I would argue it is the build up and repetition of these issues that has made authors and readers wary of the journal. This coupled with the high fees and feeling of automation leads to a perception that the outlet is mostly junk. This is a shame as there are certainly many high-value articles in Frontiers outlets. Nevertheless, academics are extremely bloodshy, and negative press creates a vicious feedback loop. If researchers feel Frontiers is a low-quality, spam-generating publisher who relies on overly automated processes, they are unlikely to submit their best work or review there. The quality of both drops, and the cycle intensifies.
For my part, I don’t intend to return to Frontiers unless they begin publishing reviews. I think this would go a long way to stemming many of these issues and encourage authors to judge individual articles on their own merits.
What do you think? What can be done to stem the tide? Please add your own thoughts, and stories of positive or negative experiences at Frontiers, in the comments.
Edit:
A final comparison question
.@neuroconscience @lakens I should also run control: Which fancydancy high IF journal publishes the most rubbish? 😛
— Sam Schwarzkopf (@sampendu) January 15, 2016