The Frontiers Review System promotes a mandate that is uniquely focused on the flawlessness and accuracy of research and is based on the unique Frontiers Review Guidelines.

Review Editors – appointed to the Frontiers Editorial Boards from the community’s top experts worldwide – constructively collaborate with authors to ensure that studies are conducted in agreement with the standards of the specific community and to improve the quality of the paper where appropriate. The mandate maximizes the publication quality and protects the rights of authors of publishing their work in a fair and unbiased process.

Review Editors focus on certifying the accuracy and validity of articles, not on evaluating their significance – the latter is done democratically by the community using the Frontiers Impact Metrics.

To ensure a constructive review process and to acknowledge their significant contribution to a better paper, review editors are disclosed on accepted articles.

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Frontiers full reviews are made up of two consecutive steps, an independent and an interactive review. In the independent review phase, review editors evaluate independently from each other whether the research is academically sound following a standardized review questionnaire. Then, Frontiers implemented for the first time the real-time Frontiers Interactive Review Forum, in which authors and review editors collaborate online via a discussion forum until convergence of the review is reached.

Thanks to the advanced internet technologies that Frontiers applied to the review, the average publication time significantly decreased and Frontiers articles are published on average within 3 months after submission. This makes Frontiers the fastest publishing platform amongst academic publishers.

Frontiers represents a significant step forward in the direction of open post-publication reviews, in that it allows any published article to be further discussed within ad-hoc publications referred to as General Commentaries: everyone can access the content of a Commentary, but in their turn Commentaries receive a peer review before being published. Moreover, Frontiers Impact Metrics provide post-publication evaluation of published research, allowing any reader to indirectly contribute to an article ranking.

You can find more detailed information on the review guidelines here.