Discover Frontiers’ unique approach to research integrity. We safeguard the quality of academic publishing combining human expertise with technology to ensure scientific excellence at scale.
Watch: our team explains what makes Frontiers' approach to research integrity unique
Our in-house research integrity team maintains ethical standards and upholds the principles of integrity and quality for all research submitted to Frontiers.
The team is led by by Elena Vicario, Head of Research Integrity, supported by 14 research integrity and auditing managers. The full team comprises 63 professionals, responsible for safeguarding research integrity both before and after publication.
Find out how to get in touch with the team
Head of Research Integrity
“Frontiers’ approach to RI sets us apart. Our proactive and detailed approach to pre-screen for research integrity issues before peer review is unique in the publishing industry. We are also pioneers in exploring patterns and using data and audits to uncover larger fraudulent networks. If you are not doing this, you are risking problematic articles reaching peer reviewers or the wider community.”
Before publication: we perform extensive integrity and quality checks on all manuscripts at the initial validation stage – before articles are seen by handling editors. Our team currently blocks and rejects around 45% of manuscripts before they enter peer review, saving valuable time for our editors and reviewers.
Identifying fraud: a dedicated auditing division focuses on proactively investigating authors linked to wider patterns of misconduct to uncover networks of large-scale organizational fraud and take action to respond to concerns.
Post-publication: the team handles all allegations of misconduct, errors, or misreporting. They do this by proactively monitoring external sources, including Retraction Watch, Pubpeer, and social media, as well as investigating all concerns raised to us directly. See our retractions policy.
AIRA is Frontiers’ AI-powered integrity tool, built into our platforms and processes to support editors, reviewers, and our research integrity team.
AIRA runs 40+ checks in just seconds before peer review, flagging potential issues like plagiarism, image manipulation, and fabricated content. This frees editors and reviewers to focus on the science itself, ensuring that peer review is both rigorous and fair.
Unlike generic AI tools, AIRA was purpose-built for academic publishing. Developed completely in-house, it is continuously updated and evolves to meet new integrity challenges. It supports - never replaces - expert judgment, combining AI precision with human oversight.
In the ever-evolving landscape of academic publishing, industry-wide collaboration has become increasingly crucial to maintain standards of research integrity and publication ethics.
Our research integrity team itakes an active role in the publishing landscape, sharing our expertise and exchanging knowledge with their peers. They contribute to key cross-publisher initiatives including: the STM Integrity Hub, the COPE Papermill working group, the United2ACT Research on Papermills Working group, the Crossref Similarity Check group and signed a Memorandum of Understanding for Research Integrity with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).
Through our COPE membership, Frontiers contributes to the advocacy and promotion of ethical publishing practices. We are currently represented by:
Marie Soulière, Head of Editorial Ethics and Quality Assurance – as an elected council member and chair of the COPE Papermill Working Group
Simone Ragavooloo, Research Integrity Portfolio Manager – as a COPE advisor
Elena Vicario, Head of Research Integrity - as a COPE advisor
We adhere to the highest quality standards and best ethical practices as members of major publishing regulatory and indexing bodies, and ethical organizations. These include:
We are also signatories of United2Act, aiming to address the collective challenge of paper mills in scholarly publishing.
Head of Editorial Ethics and Quality Assurance
"The future of publishing lies in our ability to work together across organizations, and strive towards a common goal of quality, accountability, and excellence. It’s crucial for Frontiers to position itself in this space and to have a strong presence in publication ethics and integrity in publishing. I feel incredibly lucky to be part of this dynamic environment and to be able to contribute meaningfully, with other colleagues, to the industry-wide collaborations required for the advancement of quality and integrity."
Only validated, quality research can gain society's trust and help the world solve its most pressing challenges. High-quality, reliable research, free from misconduct, manipulation or fabrication, is essential for informed decision-making by policymakers, practitioners, and the public - crucial for finding scientific solutions, from public health to environmental sustainability. When research is rigorously reviewed and published with integrity validation, we build a foundation of trust that accelerates not just scientific advancements, but also societal progress.
That's why upholding quality and integrity is part of our commitment to the research community and is built by design into everything we do.
Research Integrity Manager
"There's a dropping trust in science. I think the COVID pandemic spurred on quite a lot of this discussion because of the lack of trust in vaccines. People were asking a lot more questions of the research with a demand to know what the truth is."
Publishing now comes with a significant challenge of identifying fraudulent manuscripts. Fraudulent behavior has become very sophisticated as publishers collectively face:
fake articles
forged authorship
manipulated images
groups colluding to provide fake peer review.
To combat this, we have continually fortified our quality processes and defenses. This includes pre-screening for fraud detection and papermills at the beginning of the peer review process, saving time for our editorial boards. We have the most advanced detection process for fraudulent manuscripts in the publishing industry.
Research Integrity Manager
"We’re now seeing not just individual researchers committing misconduct for their own benefit, but an entire business model built around it, such as papermills and authorship for sale. The historical foundations of publishing incentives, as well as more researchers and more funding, have created an entire industry that has only really come to the surface in the past five or so years."
Our team is here to support you. Get in touch with us by email with any ethical concerns or queries about research integrity.
We take our responsibility to safeguard the integrity of the scientific record very seriously. If you have concerns about any misconduct, either during review or post-publication, please contact us.
We take an active role in the publishing landscape, sharing our expertise and exchanging knowledge across the industry. Please email the research integrity team if you'd like us to attend or speak at an event.
For general queries, please see other ways to contact Frontiers
Before publishing with us, learn more about Frontiers' policies and our guidelines for ethical research conduct
See our straightforward guide to take you through the process of submitting a manuscript to one of Frontiers' journals
Find out more about the process each manuscript goes through to ensure a rigorous and constructive review