The five-year plan outlines Frontiers' goals of becoming a leader in open access publishing through platform developments that integrate content with social networks and data mining. Key focuses include expanding specialty sections and research topics to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration, growing the editorial board internationally, and reinforcing quality controls. Frontiers aims to publish over 1 million articles annually from China and the US by embracing open science principles and leveraging technology to integrate published content, metadata, and networks.

1. Five-year plan
Frederick Fenter, Executive Editor

2. Open access is the expectation

3. Frontiers is a player in innovation
• Article level metrics
• Reviewer recognition
• Platform development
• Peer-review process
• Profiles and research networking

4. Products and services require data
2000 “The Database is the journal !”
2015 “The Journal is one view of the database !”

5. Impactful papers are less concentrated
“[…] throughout most of the 20th century the link between the
IF and papers’ citations was growing stronger, but, as predicted,
this link has been weakening steadily since the beginning of the digital age.”
G.A. Lozano, V. Larivière, Y. Gingras, “The Weakening Relationship Between
the Impact Factor and Papers’ Citations in the Digital Age,” JASIST, 63(11):2140–2145 (2012).

6. Content is international, interdisciplinary,
collaborative
Adams, J. (2013). Collaborations: The fourth age of research. Nature 497, 557-560 (30 May 2013)

7. Social Media influences impact
Nature 512, 126–129 (14 August 2014) doi:10.1038/512126a

8. Open Science moving to Data and Code

9. Content will be text-and-data minable

10. Journals

11. 0
20,000
40,000
60,000
80,000
100,000
120,000
140,000
160,000
180,000
Specialty Sections: where are the gaps?

12. Specialty Section Expansion
0
50
100
150
200
250
300
350
400
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

13. Humanities and Social Sciences

14. Humanities and Social Sciences
• Subject areas will include Sociology, Library and Information Science,
Communications, Business, and Management
• Schools of thought need to be considered
• Fees for Open Access
• Monographic
Ready for open access !

15. Frontiers (the Magazine)
• The summit of the Tiering mechanism
• Editorial Board of Frontiers Chief Editors
• Will accept direct submissions, too
• All open access, no APCs

16. Frontiers (the Magazine)
Coming in 2016

17. Research Topics build Journals
• Collaborative
• International
• Interdisciplinary

18. Research Topics build Journals
• Ultimate niche publication
• Flexible, aesthetic, functional
• Social
• Reopening successful topics
A focus for platform development

19. Research Topics: Quality Control
(1) Potential Topic Editors vetted by in-house team
(2) All Topic Editors and Topics approved by Specialty Chief Editors
(3) Associate Editor “oversight” assignment
(4) Full access to monitoring tools
(5) Final validation stage for all papers

20. 0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
18 Frontiers journals have Impact Factors
and rank highly in their JCR categories – despite large publishing volumes!
3.6
2.9
3.9
4.2 4.2 3.1 4.2
3.8 3.8
3.4
2.6 3.1 3.0 2.9 2.8 2.1
2.2
3.4

21. Case study: Frontiers in Psychology
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
160
180
200
Spontaneous
RT

22. Case Study: Frontiers in Microbiology
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
Spontaneous
RT

23. Case Study: Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
Spontaneous
RT

24. Case Study: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
Spontaneous
RT

25. Case Study: Frontiers in Pharmacology
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
Spontaneous
RT

26. Case Study: Frontiers in Marine Science
0
5
10
15
20
25
Spontaneous
RT

27. Editorial Boards
(1) Engages the community
(2) Maps the community across all specialties
(3) Allows Frontiers to provide a better service
(4) Expansion into new markets (China)
(5) Expansion of existing boards (AEs and REs)
(6) Editors as Authors

28. Projection: Articles published USA and China
0
100,000
200,000
300,000
400,000
500,000
600,000
700,000
800,000
900,000
1,000,000
2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 2018 2020
China United States

29. Frontiers: Submissions from China
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

30. Editorial Board Expansions
0
10,000
20,000
30,000
40,000
50,000
60,000
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
Total Editors
Total Editors
22%
140% 76%
290%
92%
20%
42%
47%

31. Editors as authors (Editor participation rate)
0
10,000
20,000
30,000
40,000
50,000
60,000
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
14%
16%
18%
18%
16%
16%
27%

32. Editors as Authors (as Percent of submissions)
0
2,000
4,000
6,000
8,000
10,000
12,000
14,000
16,000
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
Non-Editors
Editors
46%52%56%60%68%76%

33. Case Study: Microbiology Submissions
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
160
180
200
Non-Editors
Editors

34. Platform Improvements
(1) Evolving web environment
(2) Quality controls reinforced
(3) Dashboard views
(4) Semantic selections
(5) Plugging into Loop
(6) Text and data mining

35. Evolving Internet Service

36. Quality Controls reinforced
(1) Associate Editor control of selection
(2) Semantic algorithms in AE selection
(3) Grouping of AEs together into areas of competence
(4) Dashboard view of manuscript listing
(5) Final validation stage

37. Semantic selections New manuscript
submitted
We extract the title
and the abstract
We search in our
confirmed publications
database the closest
publications to the one
submitted
Then, from that results
we extract the authors
and aggregate the score
for each of them and
we propose the most
suitable reviewers

38. Profile completion is critical !

39. Plugging into Loop

40. Dashboard Views

41. Text and Data Mining through APIs
“OpenMinTed aspires to the creation of an infrastructure
that fosters and facilitates the use of text mining
technologies in the scientific publications world […]”

42. Marketing the message

43. Frontiers Blog

44. Support by Jacobs Foundation as
of April 2014
Fully linked to Frontiers journals
Financial, Editorial and IT support
Young Minds Blog on Scientific American
as of October 2014

45. Frontiers Science Heroes

46. Conference participation

47. Frontiers Travel Awards
30 Awards of € 3’000 go to
10 Specialty Chief Editors
8 Associate Editors
8 Review Editors
4 Guest Associate Editors

48. Conclusions
(1) Content will be tightly integrated into social networks
(2) Research Topics will lead trends in interdisciplinary research
(3) Open Science principles will be broadly accepted
(4) Technology + data is the winning formula

49. Thanks!