Discover how Frontiers ensures research integrity through peer review, quality checks, and proactive fraud detection. Our research integrity experts safeguard the quality of scientific publishing with support from industry-leading AI tools and a rigorous peer review process.
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Watch: what makes Frontiers' approach to research integrity unique?
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 peer-reviewed and published with integrity validation, we build a foundation of trust that accelerates not just scientific advancements, but also societal progress.
At Frontiers, upholding quality and integrity is part of our commitment to the research community and is built by design into everything we do. Following internal quality and integrity checks, every manuscript submitted receives a fair and rigorous review, conducted by experts in the relevant field.
This is embodied in our mission to make science open – so that scientists can collaborate better and innovate faster to deliver the solutions that enable healthy lives on a healthy planet.
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."
It is argued that open access publishers cut corners on quality and publish everything for the sake of profiting from an APC. This is not true.
Open access is, by design, open and transparent and anybody can check articles. Any mistake quickly becomes the subject of social media discussions - this keeps open access publishers on their toes and leads to swift ethics and research integrity investigations. As we are open to read, we are also open for full scrutiny, and that means we have to be better than anyone else in quality control.
We embed quality at every stage of the publishing process to protect the integrity of the scientific corpus – because only the valid, high-quality science has the solutions to enable all of us to live healthy lives, on a healthy planet.
Peer Review Portfolio Manager
"Equity, transparency, collaboration, and accessibility. These are the core principles of open access and they all hinge on trust. This is even more critical for open access publishers because our work reachers a much broader audience. Think about it: a patient looking up a new diagnosis or a policy maker building a case for innovation - they need to trust the research they find. Without a strong commitment to these values we can't hope to build a more knowledgeable, equitable, and sustainable world."
Quality at Frontiers is guaranteed in four key ways.
1. Our editorial boards
We have rigorous standards for selecting the editors and review editors who handle manuscript submissions. As well-known and respected leaders in their field, they have a proven track record of high-quality research.
2. Our research integrity team
We currently have the largest research integrity team to protect the scientific community, responsible for safeguarding the integrity of Frontiers’ scientific record. The team also includes a dedicated auditing division, completely unique to Frontiers. They focus on proactively investigating authors linked to wider patterns of misconduct to uncover networks of large-scale organizational fraud and take swift action to prevent and respond to concerns.
Find out more about how the team operates
3. Our innovation and technology
We pioneer in-house tools and technology to make the process of evaluating integrity and quality more efficient and precise.
Our artificial intelligence review assistant (AIRA) set an industry standard by performing rapid quality checks, spotting issues which are beyond human capability. AIRA provides decision support through recommendations and semi-automated checks, but the final say is always made by a human. This includes 25 separate manuscript checks before the review process and a further 14 during the review process.
AIRA provides decision support to our internal teams and editors through recommendations and semi-automated checks throughout the peer review process, but the final say is always made by a human.
Specialty Chief Editor, Frontiers in Veterinary Science, UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA)
"I like Frontiers' artificial intelligence assistant, AIRA, which helps at the beginning to detect some issues. This can save time for editors because you know you'll be working with manuscripts that are fit for review."
4. Ongoing support
Our research integrity and peer review teams are on hand to guide editors, reviewers, and authors through every step of the peer review process, even helping post-publication.
Read more about our peer review process
We continually audit and assess our processes to make improvements and put new measures in place to safeguard quality. We also continuously audit groups of manuscripts to uncover patterns that may not be visible in a single manuscript. By looking at a larger number of submissions and publications simultaneously we discover patterns of authorship overlap, reviewer overlap and similarity of structure and text that confirm fraudulent activity.
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.”
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 fortified our quality processes and defenses and launched a new quality register and framework – reinforced with additional AI-powered quality checks and research integrity controls. This includes pre-screening for fraud detection and papermills at the beginning of the peer review process, saving time for our editorial boards who are not finding out that there are RI issues after they have already spent time doing their review.
In the interests of security, we do not share details of our checks publicly as we have also found that this allows the fraudulent actors to develop ever more sophisticated approaches to circumvent our quality controls. However, we are confident that 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."
In the ever-evolving landscape of academic publishing, and as we continue to face new challenges and opportunities, industry-wide collaboration has become increasingly crucial to maintain standards of research integrity and publication ethics.
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.
The team is also taking a more active role in the publishing landscape, sharing our expertise and exchanging knowledge with our fellow research integrity comrades. They have joined and contributed 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 actively 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.
We’ve been involved in the crafting of key industry-wide guidance and best practice for publishers on the topics of:
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."
Quality must be judged based on direct experience - or on its results.
Feedback from the research community shows that our care for quality is recognized by research communities. Since the start of 2022 we have been asking visitors to our website to rate the quality of our service. The results are the voices of thousands of researchers. Although our quality ratings were already high, in 2023 we have seen another increase, particularly in the excellent category.
93% of researchers rated our articles as excellent or good
91% of researchers rated our peer review as excellent or good
93% of researchers rated our editorial boards as excellent or good
In our annual brand survey, respondents were asked to rate the trustworthiness of some of the top publishers they are familiar with.
The 2023 survey shows that 77% of respondents think Frontiers is trustworthy, an increase of six percentage points from the year before.
Articles published in our journals have been cited 9.4 million times worldwide (June 2024)
109 Frontiers' journals have a Journal Impact Factor and 113 have a CiteScore
15 Frontiers' journals rank as the most cited in their JCR category (2024 Journal Citation Reports)
Take a deep dive into all our impact metrics
Our in-house research integrity team maintains ethical standards and upholds the principles of integrity for all submitted and published research. They are responsible for safeguarding the integrity of Frontiers' scientific record, both pre and post publication.
Watch: Dimitri Christodoulou, Frontiers associate content director, talks about how our team operates to uphold quality and integrity.
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 33% of manuscripts before they enter peer review because of sub-standard, invalid, or problematic content, saving valuable time for our editors and reviewers.
Identifying fraud
A dedicated auditing division, completely unique to Frontiers, 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. We are confident that we have the most advanced detection process for fraudulent manuscripts in the publishing industry.
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.
Chief Publishing Officer Mirjam Eckert's post talks about how we have responded to an increase in fraudulent activity by redoubling our quality measures. It answers questions about how we safeguard quality and why this is so important for us.
We report on a collection of our impact metrics at the publisher and journal levels, focusing on industry standard measures of quality including citations.
We publish a progress report each year, holding us accountable for our activity and achievements. The report includes our acceptance and rejection rates for articles, feedback from our community, and our journal and publisher impact metrics.