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 ourhome website, as well as on each individual journal webpage.Collaborative Peer-Review: http://home.frontiersin.org/about/review-system and on journalpages, for example: http://journal.frontiersin.org/journal/psychology#aboutPublishing Model: http://home.frontiersin.org/about/publishing-modelFees: http://home.frontiersin.org/about/publishing-fees and on journal pages, for example:http://journal.frontiersin.org/journal/psychology#feesImpact neutral collaborative peer review: We mandate an impact-neutral peer review focusedon objective criteria to assess the rigor and validity of the work presented. We operate aninteractive review process as mentioned above allowing reviewers to interact with the authorsand 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 thereviewers who have endorsed the article are made available on the publication for transparencyand 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 commentsthat readers can post on any article. This is a form of post-publication, community-driven orcrowd-sourced review.Quality of Editors: Frontiers takes all efforts to establish Editorial Boards with high impactleading 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) HarvardUniversity, 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 tothe overall building of the journal and not linked to acceptances of articles.Automation: Frontiers operates a custom developed publishing system with automatedworkflows from submission to publication. These send automated emails triggered at variousstages of the article pipeline, semantic matching algorithms, profiles, etc.Frontiers Staff: As part of our general principle that a publisher should not be shaping thedirection of science, we operate a strict policy that no paid staff of Frontiers has any authority tomake any decision on acceptances or rejections of articles. All such decisions are made byexternal academic editors.Retractions: Readers that identify problems in an article that might justify retraction typicallywrite to either the Editorial Office or to the Chief Editor to point out the problem. The ChiefEditor decides whether to start an initial investigation. If the problem is deemed to be potentiallyserious, we follow a well-defined retraction protocol.Quality of Articles published: Frontiers was founded only 8 years ago, but the quality of thepeer review can already be quantified in terms of total citations received and Impact Factorsawarded. Frontiers has the highest acceptance rates into the JCR among all Open Accessbecause of the strong record of citations.