Frontiers

All Frontiers journals operate under the same editorial processes and ethical policies. Our Collaborative Review guidelines and publishing philosophy are explained in detail on our home website, as well as on each individual journal webpage. Collaborative Peer-Review: http://home.frontiersin.org/about/review-system and on journal pages, for example: http://journal.frontiersin.org/journal/psychology#about Publishing Model: http://home.frontiersin.org/about/publishing-model Fees: http://home.frontiersin.org/about/publishing-fees and on journal pages, for example: http://journal.frontiersin.org/journal/psychology#fees Impact neutral collaborative peer review: We mandate an impact-neutral peer review focused on objective criteria to assess the rigor and validity of the work presented. We operate an interactive review process as mentioned above allowing reviewers to interact with the authors and even with each other directly, and the reports are also available for all participants to see. Impact neutral peer review results in accepting about 75% of submitted articles. Public disclosure of Editors and Reviewers: The names of the handling editor and the reviewers who have endorsed the article are made available on the publication for transparency and accountability. Post-publication review: Once papers are published, subjective aspects such as novelty, importance and general interest are judged using Article-Level Metrics and through comments that readers can post on any article. This is a form of post-publication, community-driven or crowd-sourced review. Quality of Editors: Frontiers takes all efforts to establish Editorial Boards with high impact leading scientists. ~80% of our editors are from the top 400 universities in the world. The universities with the highest numerical representation of editors are 1) NIH, 2) Harvard University, Max-Planck Society, University College London, Stanford University, etc. Inforgraphic: http://blog.frontiersin.org/2015/04/21/infographic-frontiers-editors-by-the- numbers/ Honoraria: Field Chief Editors and Specialty Chief Editors receive honoraria that are linked to the overall building of the journal and not linked to acceptances of articles. Automation: Frontiers operates a custom developed publishing system with automated workflows from submission to publication. These send automated emails triggered at various stages of the article pipeline, semantic matching algorithms, profiles, etc. Frontiers Staff: As part of our general principle that a publisher should not be shaping the direction of science, we operate a strict policy that no paid staff of Frontiers has any authority to make any decision on acceptances or rejections of articles. All such decisions are made by external academic editors. Retractions: Readers that identify problems in an article that might justify retraction typically write to either the Editorial Office or to the Chief Editor to point out the problem. The Chief Editor decides whether to start an initial investigation. If the problem is deemed to be potentially serious, we follow a well-defined retraction protocol. Quality of Articles published: Frontiers was founded only 8 years ago, but the quality of the peer review can already be quantified in terms of total citations received and Impact Factors awarded. Frontiers has the highest acceptance rates into the JCR among all Open Access because of the strong record of citations.