Integration with leading grantee platforms and pre-print servers further simplifies the submission process for Frontiers’ authors.

Authors can now easily and quickly submit manuscripts directly to Frontiers from two platforms: Chronos — a platform that enables researchers, research organizations, funders and publishers, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to easily comply with funder publishing mandates — and pre-print repository bioRxiv. The integration of these external research platforms into the Frontiers submission system is the latest development in Frontiers’ efforts to continually improve the publishing process and offer ever-more author services.

“We are delighted to offer our authors the possibility of submitting directly from Chronos and BioRxiv,” says Kamila Markram, Co-founder and CEO of Frontiers. “The linking of these two leading pre-publication and grantee platforms with the Frontiers publishing platform helps to streamline and better connect different parts of the research lifecycle.”

The Chronos platform helps researchers to easily identify journals that are compliant with their organization’s publishing requirements, and funders and research institutions to manage their publishing mandate compliance and repository submissions. Additionally, under an Open Access agreement with Frontiers, Chronos has centralized the invoicing process for article processing charges (APCs), further optimizing the process. With the new integration, grantees can now directly submit their manuscript to Frontiers from Chronos — which then manages the APC payment, ensures compliancy with the funder’s mandate, and updates stakeholders once the article is published, without any involvement from the authors.

Launched by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 2013, the bioRxiv platform is a repository for non-peer-reviewed manuscripts in life science fields. Such pre-prints allow authors to share their research quickly and receive early feedback. These manuscripts can now be directly submitted to Frontiers through the bioRxiv platform, together with metadata — meaning authors no longer need to provide the same information about their manuscript separately on each system.

Chronos and BioRxiv are the first research platforms to be integrated into the Frontiers submission system, with many others coming soon. These efforts to simplify the steps between pre-publication and publication follow ongoing Open Science innovations and collaborations with top external service providers — all aiming to maximize efficiency across the publishing process and research life cycle.