Frontiers Editors Summit 2017. Image: Frontiers

With over 75,000 articles published to date and many Frontiers journals ranking among the highest cited in their fields, Frontiers journals achieve scientific excellence at scale through two key ingredients. The first is our custom-built Open Science Platform, which delivers cutting-edge technology to ensure quality control of articles and to facilitate editorial decision making. The second key ingredient is the world-class researchers involved in our editorial programs. These encompass our Editorial Boards and our ever-growing global author network. They inspire and motivate us to be innovative, to continuously improve our Open Science platform, and find new ways to disseminate research farther.

Leading editors in Frontiers’ journals

We now have over 75,000 researchers on our Editorial Boards across 59 Frontiers journals – one of the largest and most prestigious in the world. Frontiers board members not only include our Chief Editors and Associate Editors (handling editors during peer review), but also the experts who review the articles. These experts are acknowledged as Review Editors and named on published articles — to recognize their contribution to the Collaborative Review and bring transparency and accountability to the process.

We build our Editorial Boards with the aim of creating editorial partnerships with scientific leaders — so it’s no surprise that our editors are affiliated with the highest-ranking research institutes in the world. This is also mirrored in the authors who publish in Frontiers journals.

Figure 1. The Frontiers community of editors and authors sorted by institutional representation.

From Harvard, NIH and Stanford in the USA, to CNRS, CSIC, Max Planck, CNR, University College London and University of Oxford in Europe, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Asia, our journals have amazing editorial representation from worldwide centers of excellence, also reflected in the international representation:

Figure 2. Geographical breakdown of Frontiers’ 75,000 editors.

All content decisions within our peer review process are in the hands of our editors, so their expertise is a guarantee of our content quality.

Global authors, global research focus

Our reach to the key global research areas is also reflected in the authors who submit to our journals. Our articles represent the full breadth of research around the world: from among our 300,000+ authors, the top 5 countries of affiliation are: US, China, Germany, Italy, and the UK.

Figure 3. Geographical breakdown of Frontiers’ 300,000 authors.

The strategic feedback of our editors, and richly varied submissions of our authors, also guide us in prioritizing ever-growing new areas of research. We are constantly launching new sections and journals. For example, in 2017 we aligned our new sustainability research publishing program with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and launched our first journal in the Sustainability Programme: Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems.

“Scientific information should be available to all researchers”, emphasizes Prof. Maria Pilar Bernal from Centro de Edafología y Biología Aplicada del Segura (CSIC), Spain, who is the Specialty Chief Editor for the Waste Management in Agroecosystems section — underlining why Frontiers’ core values appeal to the leading experts who join our Boards. It’s all about our experts, leading the way for new discoveries and high-quality content.