Category Archives: oa.frontiers

Frontiers welcomes new partnership with World Economic Forum | STM Publishing News

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“As part of the new agreement, Frontiers will join the WEF’s Centre for New Society and Economy and will champion open science across the network. Supporting global initiatives in the field, Frontiers will work with its WEF partners to share and promote the evidence-based benefits of open science and to influence global thinking on its positive impact on society.   

Kamila Markram, Frontiers’ chief executive officer said: ‘our track record of collaboration with the World Economic Forum is one that we have long valued and becoming a Platform Partner is a natural transition for us. We share a common vision on how to address the challenges faced by society and I look forward to combining our efforts in support of this.’ …”

Clarivate’s former publisher relations expert joins Frontiers | Research Information

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“Research publisher Frontiers appoints Tom Ciavarella as head of public affairs and advocacy for North America to strategise and execute advocacy initiatives to support Frontiers’ mission and accelerate transition to open science.

Tom has 20 years’ experience in relationship management, business development, and content strategy. After an early career in copy-editing and writing, he worked at F.A. Davis Company, an independent medical publisher in the US, where he acquired and developed new medical textbooks and helped bring print-only resources into the digital world. In 2015, Tom joined Clarivate Analytics (now Clarivate) as a publisher relations manager for Web of Science Group with a focus on content and communication strategy. 

Most recently, Tom managed large strategic accounts for the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), a non-profit that helps publishers and other copyright holders coordinate content delivery, licensing, and open access workflows. Tom also served as a liaison to CCC’s government relations team, which works to guide policymakers on copyright modernisation and related topics. …”

Inflationary adjustment to Frontiers’ Article Processing Charges – Science & research news | Frontiers

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“At Frontiers, APCs are paid in US dollars, the value of which has recently been under strong inflationary pressure.  Against international cost-of-living indicators, the dollar has lost 13% of its value since the last time we adjusted APCs at the end of 2017.  

Unlike other publishers, we have not made annual adjustments to the costs of our services during that period.

As of August 2022, we will raise APCs by 9.32% to help partially offset the recent inflationary losses to the value of the dollar. This will allow us to continue to reinvest in our operations while offering the highest quality, sustainable publishing services. We employ an international team of over 1,700 publishing professionals, who provide the expertise and technology skills to maintain and expand our editorial program and help make more science, open science….”

It is not transformation if nothing changes – Science & research news | Frontiers

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“The substantial benefits of open access (OA) publishing are within our reach, but legacy publishers are employing commercial tactics to delay the necessary transition.

This paper exposes several of the negative, often unintended, consequences of “transformative agreements” (TAs).  It argues that these agreements, sold as a pathway to open science, in fact reinforce the status quo.  TAs maintain paywalled access as the standard financial model in publishing.  They are negotiated in the absence of basic competition and procurement rules.  And by concentrating resources into silos for a few incumbents only, they pose a threat to the diversity of the publishing ecosystem, locking out innovators, including the very players who demonstrate the benefits of OA publishing.  Deployed as a commercial tactic, these agreements will stall the establishment of a transparent and competitive marketplace for professional editorial services….:”

Switzerland and Frontiers reach national open access agreement | Research Information

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“The Swiss research community has strengthened its commitment to open access through a new national publishing agreement with the Lausanne-based open-access publisher Frontiers.

The one-year pilot supports authors from 18 institutions, including hospitals, who are now able to publish in Frontiers’ broad portfolio of 146 journals, hosted on Frontiers’ open-science platform. Paid in advance by the institutions through the Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries (CSAL), the arrangement enables the authors to enjoy better research visibility and supports rapid dissemination of their studies across the 1,100 academic disciplines covered by Frontiers’ journals….”

Frontiers for Young Minds celebrates 15 million article views!

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Reaching 15 million article views is an exciting moment for us at Frontiers for Young Minds. It means that we are reaching more and more kids, teachers, and other interested people around the world, who now have the opportunity to learn about topics they care about from a reliable scientific resource. This year our journal team went from a team of two to a team of six and we have launched our flagship Noble Collection, which are certainly the two biggest highlights. Did you know that Frontiers for Young Minds also has Hebrew (451 translated articles) and Arabic (150 translated articles) versions? More languages are certainly on our radar in the near future too!

Five Nobel Prize winners publish scientific article collection for children – Science & research news | Frontiers

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Written for young people aged eight to 15, the collection has been published in the journal Frontiers for Young Minds. With the help of a science mentor, each article in the Nobel Collection has been reviewed by kids themselves to ensure it is understandable, fun, and engaging before publication. By sparking an interest in science from a young age, the Nobel Collection aims to improve young people’s scientific worldview. Its objective is to equip them with a scientific mindset and appreciation of the central role of science in finding solutions to today’s growing catalogue of global challenges. 

MyScienceWork to index award winning open access scholarly publisher Frontiers | EurekAlert! Science News

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Research management tech provider MyScienceWork (MSW) is pleased to announce Frontiers research articles are now indexed in the MyScienceWork platform. Effective from June 2021, this partnership will enhance the research experience for academics, granting unrestricted access to an additional 200,000 rigorously certified research articles across 103 journals, spanning 866 academic disciplines to be read, cited and built upon.

Frontiers Policy Labs Mission Statement — Frontiers Policy Labs

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“The Frontiers Policy Labs initiative seeks to strengthen the connection between robust scientific research and informed policymaking. The challenges we face today are as stark as they are complex; the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate emergency are just two among many that we must now address. Now is the time to look to science as a tool to enable better, more holistic decision making; an interface through which policy is driven by evidence. To enable that, science must be open, science must be trusted, and science must be accessible. 

Insights will be added regularly, and we encourage you to listen, learn, and perhaps most importantly, join the debate.  …”

2020 in review: A year in Open Science policy  – Science & research news | Frontiers

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“How to begin to summarize what 2020?has?meant for policy and science? It feels like a decade’s worth of catastrophic news and disruption, followed by unprecedented innovative responses.  It was also the year that proved?beyond?doubt?that access to scientific knowledge must be free and immediately open to effectively address the challenges faced by society….

However,?progress was made in Open Science in 2020: ? 

In the US,?meetings with stakeholders?and?a public round of evidence gathering?occured?to prepare for an?executive order mandating OA?for?federally funded research.?No tangible result has emerged, yet?it catalyzed grassroots support for: #OAintheUSA. Expectations are that the incoming Biden administration will pick up the initiative.? 

UNESCO conducted a?global consultation of the academic community?over the summer?to prepare a?Recommendation on?Open Science, for adoption in 2021.?Similarly,?in October,?the World Health?Organization?(WHO), UNESCO,?and the?UN High Commissioner for Human Rights?statement?issued a?joint call for Open Science,?to which we offered our support.?? 

In November, the UN launched a new partnership of publishers committed to the Sustainable Development Goals,?the SDG Publishers Compact. Frontiers and other signatories committed?to promoting research and education and to work inside and outside the company to support the SDGs.  

Frontiers joined?the Initiative for?Open Abstracts (I4OA),?which advocates for the?unrestricted availability of abstracts in scholarly communications.?By joining I4OA, our abstracts will be deposited on?Crossref, adding a layer of support to the OA community’s mission to make all science open.? …”

No agreement with Frontiers in Germany | scidecode

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“As Bernhard Mittermaier, head of the central library of the Forschungszentrum Jülich, announced yesterday, there will be no agreement with Frontiers in Germany. The negotiations between the Forschungszentrum Jülich and the Open Access Publisher Frontiers on a nationwide framework contract did not succeed….

The criticism on the planned agreement with the Open Access Publisher Frontiers in Germany stemmed from the fact that many German universities and universities of applied sciences have set up Open Access funds funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG) in its program Open Access Publizieren, which reimburse APCs in Gold Open Access Journals up to a maximum of €2000 gross. Many libraries regard this limit as a suitable means of not overburdening their Open Access budget and see it as an opportunity to slow down the price increase of APCs. Two examples of the criticism of the planned Frontiers agreement mentioned by Mr. Mittermaier can be found online, one by Thomas Krichl and one by Michael Wohlgemuth….”

 

No agreement with Frontiers in Germany | scidecode

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“As Bernhard Mittermaier, head of the central library of the Forschungszentrum Jülich, announced yesterday, there will be no agreement with Frontiers in Germany. The negotiations between the Forschungszentrum Jülich and the Open Access Publisher Frontiers on a nationwide framework contract did not succeed….

The criticism on the planned agreement with the Open Access Publisher Frontiers in Germany stemmed from the fact that many German universities and universities of applied sciences have set up Open Access funds funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG) in its program Open Access Publizieren, which reimburse APCs in Gold Open Access Journals up to a maximum of €2000 gross. Many libraries regard this limit as a suitable means of not overburdening their Open Access budget and see it as an opportunity to slow down the price increase of APCs. Two examples of the criticism of the planned Frontiers agreement mentioned by Mr. Mittermaier can be found online, one by Thomas Krichl and one by Michael Wohlgemuth….”

 

Peer Review of Scholarly Research Gets an AI Boost – IEEE Spectrum

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“Open-access publisher Frontiers has debuted an AI tool called the Artificial Intelligence Review Assistant (AIRA), which purports to eliminate much of the grunt work associated with peer review. Since the beginning of June 2020, every one of the 11,000-plus submissions Frontiers received has been run through AIRA, which is integrated into its collaborative peer-review platform. This also makes it accessible to external users, accounting for some 100,000 editors, authors, and reviewers. Altogether, this helps “maximize the efficiency of the publishing process and make peer-review more objective,” says Kamila Markram, founder and CEO of Frontiers.

AIRA’s interactive online platform, which is a first of its kind in the industry, has been in development for three years.. It performs three broad functions, explains Daniel Petrariu, director of project management: assessing the quality of the manuscript, assessing quality of peer review, and recommending editors and reviewers. At the initial validation stage, the AI can make up to 20 recommendations and flag potential issues, including language quality, plagiarism, integrity of images, conflicts of interest, and so on. “This happens almost instantly and with [high] accuracy, far beyond the rate at which a human could be expected to complete a similar task,” Markram says….

The AI’s job is to flag concerns; humans take the final decisions….”

Frontiers 2020: a third of journals increase prices by 45 times the inflation rate | Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs

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A third of the journals published by Frontiers in 2019 and 2020 (20 / 61 journals) have increased in price by 18% or more (up to 55%). This is quite a contrast with the .4% Swiss inflation rate for 2019 according to Worlddata.info ; 18% is 45 times the inflation rate. This is an even more marked contrast with the current and anticipated economic impact of COVID; according to Le News, “A team of economic experts working for the Swiss government forecasts a 6.7% fall in GDP”. (Frontiers’ headquarters is in Switzerland).

The International Journal of Public Health transitions to Open Access – Science & research news | Frontiers

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“The International Journal of Public Health is pleased to announce that from January 2021 it will transition from a subscription model to Gold Open Access. 

The journal, which celebrates its 100th anniversary soon, will also be transferring from its current publisher Springer Nature to Frontiers, a leading Gold Open Access publisher offering tailored services and a highly technologically advanced platform.

Owned by the Swiss School of Public Health (SSPH+), the School is proud to announce the transition….”