Frontiers for Young Minds, the science education initiative where kids review articles by leading scientists, officially launches this week at the USA Science and Engineering Festival in Washington D.C.

Frontiers for Young Minds is a web-based science journal that involves young people in the review of scientific articles with the help of scientists who act as mentors. It empowers young people by giving them a decisional role in the process of science communication and helps to engage the next generation of scientists.

The initiative has so far involved 86 young people, aged 5 to 16, who act as reviewers, and 79 mentors. Popular articles include “The amazing history of neuroscience”, “Facebook, being cool and your brain: what science tells us” and “The scientific significance of sleep talking”.

The pilot project was announced at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in November 2013 and has been enthusiastically received by scientists, children, schools and families across the world.

The official launch at the USA Science and Engineering Festival showcases the new design of the Frontiers for Young Minds website with a selection of 20 new science papers, written in a language that everyone can understand.

Join us at the Frontiers for Young Minds booth (shared with Scientific American) to celebrate the launch with a stimulating ‘science review workshop’, which will include teenage students and a mentor who will jointly review a science article – the concept will come to life as their questions, criticisms, and suggestions are collected to help the author improve the paper! And meet the scientist who inspired this new science journal, Robert T. Knight, Editor-in-Chief of Frontiers for Young Minds, and Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, USA.

The USA Science and Engineering Festival is the largest science, technology, engineering and medicine education event in the US. Over 350,000 people are expected to attend. This year’s meeting will take place on 26 and 27 April at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington D.C.

Frontiers for Young Minds is published by Frontiers, an open-access publisher and research networking platform. The project has received funding from the Jacobs Foundation, based in Zurich, Switzerland.

“Frontiers for Young Minds flips the process of learning science on its head. Instead of adults deciding what kids want, the kids get to say what and how they want to learn. Many scientists are eager to share their research, but don’t always know how to best communicate with a young audience. Frontiers for Young Minds enables young people to have a deciding role and to help improve science papers for kids through their comments, criticisms, and suggestions,” says Robert Knight, Editor-in-Chief of Frontiers for Young Minds.

“Frontiers for Young Minds puts a publishing platform in place that brings the latest scientific results to the broadest of possible publics — children, their schools, and their families. There are many science websites for kids, but none of them engages young people directly in the validation of content for publication. Frontiers for Young Minds empowers kids by giving them an important role in the publishing process and they help to make literature accessible to all. We are providing an innovative channel for scientific communication that is desperately needed,” says Fred Fenter, Executive Editor, Frontiers.

**About Frontiers for Young Minds**Frontiers for Young Minds is a science journal that includes young people in the review of articles by leading scientists.  The latest science papers are edited for kids, by kids and this has the double benefit of bringing young people into the world of scientific research – many of them for the first time – while offering active scientists a platform for reaching out to the broadest of all publics. Frontiers for Young Minds is published by Frontiers, an open-access publisher and research networking platform. For more information, visit: www.kids.frontiersin.org

Connect with Frontiers for Young Minds:Twitter: @FrontYoungMindsFacebook.com/YoungMinds