Frontiers is a Swiss-based scholarly communications company. We publish open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles, and our research network allows academics to communicate quickly, effectively, and freely with their colleagues from around the world. The Frontiers initiative began within the neuroscience community and it gradually grew to address other fields. Frontiers promotes the idea that everyone should have an equal opportunity to share, seek and generate knowledge. To reach these objectives, the key concept of the Frontiers publishing model include, besides full open access, novel processes in the review and evaluation of research, as well as progressive distillation of the best published knowledge and an advanced service-oriented IT platform. The interplay of all these features creates a strong synergy that makes Frontiers stand out and differ from any other academic publisher.

Thomson ISI requires at least three complete years of publishing, plus a few of other criteria, before issuing an impact factor for a specific journal. In the case of Frontiers, this condition has so far been met by a number of our Neuroscience journals. Impact factors are issued for the preceding year involving complex criteria that evaluate the previous three years' citations.

The impact factor for Frontiers in Human Neuroscience was 1.6 in 2009, 1.9 in 2010, and 2.3 in 2011. This pattern of steadily rising impact factors is consistent across the Frontiers journals for which impact factors have been issued, and we expect it to continue. Among other Frontiers journals with impact factors are Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience (2.1 in 2011), Frontiers in Neuroanatomy (3.1 in 2011), Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience (4.2 in 2011), and Frontiers in Neural Circuits (5.1 in 2011).

More Frontiers journals will receive impact factors in 2013, and we are confident that newer Frontiers journals will be included in the Journal Citation Reports in the future.

Yes. If your article has been accepted for publication (but not yet published) and you believe that it is potentially newsworthy, you should contact Frontiers Communications Office at communications@frontiersin.org, who will take it into consideration. Please include a short (no more than half a page) focused on a summary of the findings and why they are important, as well as your article title and specialty it was submitted to.

Frontiers journals publish exclusively online, at continuous frequency. Every time a new article is accepted by the editor, we publish it directly and update the table of contents on our website. Articles appear on the journal’s main page with links to the full article content and images, accessible at no cost to any reader worldwide.

Frontiers also publishes ebooks arising from Frontiers Research Topics, which bring together a collection of published articles around a focused research question, and which can be purchased and downloaded on the website.

Frontiers printed quarterly hardcopy issues of the field journal Frontiers in Neuroscience until 2010, but the hardcopy was discontinued in order to focus on delivering top-quality online content at a sustainable, affordable open access publishing fee.

• I have a general question or my question was not listed in the FAQs: info@frontiersin.org
• I have a technical problem: support@frontiersin.org
• I would like to participate to or organize a conference: events@frontiersin.org
• I have a question about an article submission: editorial.office@frontiersin.org
• I have a question about my accepted or published article: production@frontiersin.org
• I would like to request a fee waiver for my article: waivers@frontiersin.org
• I have a question related to a Frontiers Research Topic: researchtopics@frontiersin.org
• I would like to advertise on your website: advertising@frontiersin.org
• I would like to suggest a new journal: editorial.office@frontiersin.org
• I would like to invite or become an editor, or I have a question about my editorial duties: editorial.office@frontiersin.org

Frontiers article publishing fees are payable upon an article’s acceptance for publication. They are among the lowest in open access publishing and there are many waivers and subsidies available. Please find all details at .

Open access is free for any reader, but it is not free for publishers. Frontiers operates on an author- pay/reader-free model, also known as “Gold Open Access.” Author fees help offset the cost of managing large editorial boards, administering peer review of articles, developing and maintaining the IT required to maintain the journals and the journal website, and many other associated costs. To read more about open access, please see here: .

• Frontiers continuously upgrades its advanced IT platform with new functionalities and services for academic publishing.
• Frontiers covers the publishing costs of all no-fee articles (invited reviews, commentaries on other papers, etc.) as well as the review costs of rejected articles.
• Frontiers employs professional editors to format your manuscript and produce the highest quality HTML and PDF.
• Frontiers employs XML editors to make your article PubMed-compatible and submits your article to PubMed Central for indexing; furthermore, Frontiers integrates sophisticated article-level metrics – both our own and third-party systems - so that the citation impact of your article can be fully tracked.
• Frontiers provides secure server technology for permanent storage and free, widespread accessibility of your articles.
• Frontiers promotes free dissemination of research and subsidizes publishing costs for those researchers who cannot afford the publishing fee.
• Frontiers provides awards to a number of our hard-working editors.
• Frontiers maintains a dynamic and professional team to support all your editorial, IT and marketing needs.

Authors who can demonstrate an inability to bear publication fees may apply to Frontiers for an article fee waiver, which may cover all or part of the article publishing charge. Some conditions make authors automatically eligible for a fee waiver, as outlined below.

• Up to 100% waiver if the corresponding author is from a “low income” country as defined by the World Bank Country Classification table (calculated using the "Atlas method" - see this reference or download the table).
• Up to 50% waiver if the corresponding author is from a “lower middle income” country as defined by the World Bank Country Classification table (calculated using the "Atlas method" - see (see this reference or download the table).

Waivers may also be granted if the corresponding author can demonstrate a genuine inability to pay.

Authors who wish to apply for a waiver should provide the name of their grant/institution and a short explanatory paragraph as to why the publishing fees are unaffordable, and send this to waivers@frontiersin.org. Authors wishing to apply must do so before, or immediately after, the manuscript is submitted.

Authors who wish to apply for a waiver should provide the name of their grant/institution and a short explanatory paragraph as to why the publishing fees are unaffordable, and send this to waivers@frontiersin.org. Authors wishing to apply must do so before, or immediately after, the manuscript is submitted.

A waiver is applied to the publishing fee. If applicable, VAT is calculated and added to the net amount. As an example, a Research Topic article submitted by an American resident who was granted a 20% supplementary waiver will receive the following invoice:

Only if you are a resident of Switzerland or Liechtenstein. Frontiers is required by Swiss law to charge value-added tax (VAT) on all goods and services supplied to Swiss- and Liechtenstein- resident individuals and all Swiss- and Liechtenstein-based organizations as well as a small number of other customers. Some Swiss regions have special rules. If you have been wrongly charged Swiss VAT, please contact accounting@frontiersin.org.

Until a payment is completed, you have the possibility of updating the payer information directly from the website. This can be done by accessing the invoice in the article Review Forum and clicking "Modify Payer". If a payment has already been verified by the accounting office, it is necessary to send an email to accounting@frontiersin.org with your request.

If you have paid an invoice online using a credit card, our system automatically registered the transaction, and you will not receive any reminders. For any related issue, please send us an email to accounting@frontiersin.org.

If you used a different payment option (such as bank transfer or check), there is a technical delay before the payment is deposited into our account. Also, it could take a few days for the accounting office to match your payment to your invoice. The verification time can be substantially reduced if your invoice number is clearly indicated in the transaction details, and if you upload a proof of payment (from the invoice detail page).

Under the Frontiers Terms and Conditions, authors retain the copyright to their work. All Frontiers articles are Open Access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, (CC-BY 3,0), which permits the use, distribution and reproduction of material from published articles, provided the original authors and source are credited, and subject to any copyright notices concerning any third-party content.

Different journals may accept different article types. You can find a list of all our journals here: http://www.frontiersin.org/about/journalseries.

Click on the journal title that is relevant to you and then on “Article types”.

To reproduce one of your figures originally published in a Frontiers Journal, no permission is needed. Nevertheless, the full citation of the original publication is mandatory. Please follow the following example: "Figure as originally published in Weiss SA and Faber DS (2010) Field effects in the CNS play functional roles Front. Neural Circuits 4:15. doi: 10.3389/fncir.2010.00015".

If you would like to reproduce copyrighted figures or text in a Frontiers article which were originally published elsewhere, you will have to acquire permission from the original publisher. You will need to request a publisher license, which includes the permission to publish the figures or text in a Frontiers article. When submitting your article, please include the license with the rest of your files. Please bear in mind that Frontiers cannot cover any permission fees charged by other publishers for copyrighted material, and it is the responsibility of the author to cover any supplementary charges.

If you would like to submit more than15 figures along with your article, please contact our IT Helpdesk at support@frontiersin.org.

For a template please download Frontiers LaTeX.

As soon as your article is published it will be submitted to PubMed Central for indexing. Please allow approximately 2-4 weeks for PubMed Central to process and index your article full text and for the citation to appear in PubMed.

All biomedical articles published in Frontiers journals are included immediately in PubMed Central, the most widely used biomedical bibliographic database service. PubMed Central is a National Library of Medicine service that provides access to MEDLINE, articles not yet in MEDLINE and articles from additional life science journals. Frontiers is also indexed in CrossRef, the Directory of Open Access Journals, Google Scholar, and PsycInfo (depending on the journal). Because the full text of all Frontiers Articles is available without registration or subscription, search engines such as Google also index them – which greatly increases their visibility.

Some Frontiers Journals are indexed by Thomson Reuters (ISI) Web Of Knowledge. Articles from these journals are searchable through the Web of Science and other Thomson Reuters (ISI) products. We expect more Frontiers journals to be indexed in Web Of Knowledge in the future.

To check the resolution of your figure, open the image in any preview program and enlarge it to 100%- 150%. If the image appears blurry or has a stair-stepped effect the quality of the resolution is too low. Note that it is not possible to check image resolution in MS Word.

An image must be captured at the desired resolution or better. Increasing resolution after capture will never improve the quality of an image. If the resolution is too low, the image will appear pixelated.

Preferably not. We prefer that your figures be submitted in TIFF format, because this is a common interchange format that offers high quality and is readable by a wide number of applications.

Once your article has been accepted it will be sent for typesetting immediately. You should receive an author proof shortly thereafter. After you approve this version for final publication, the PDF will should be published within a week. Note that your cooperation in reviewing the author’s proof is essential, and that a time limit for your response is applied to ensure a quick publication process. Your will be required to provide your comments within 2 business days.

While covering these key roles of the entire Frontiers structure, Frontiers editors and authors are presented with the following rights, obligations and responsibilities.

The Field Chief Editor is:

• Responsible for appointing specialty chief editors and entitled to recommend the appointment of associate editors to specialty chief editors;
• Responsible for overseeing the article selection process that leads to tier climbing;
• Responsible for enforcing Frontiers’ high standards among editors and authors.

The Specialty Chief Editor is:

• Responsible for appointing associate editors and entitled to recommend the appointment of review editors;
• Responsible for confirming any recommendation to reject an article;
• Required to take action when delays arise, and to mediate between authors and review editors in case the associate editor is unable to resolve a conflict.

The Associate Editor is:

• Responsible for appointing review editors;
• Responsible for managing the review of submitted manuscripts, e.g. inviting review editors, activating the Interactive Review Forum, moderating consensus-based peer review, accepting the final manuscript, etc.;
• Responsible of ensuring timeliness and fairness of reviews;
• Entitled to recommend rejection of manuscripts.

Review Editors are:

• Responsible for the direct review of individual manuscripts in Frontiers, through the submission of Independent Review Reports and direct participation in Frontiers Interactive Review;
• Agree to reveal their identities to authors and readers if they endorse a manuscript’s publication;
• Entitled to object to the publication of a manuscript;
• Entitled to withdraw from an article review if a dispute has arisen that cannot be resolved.

All manuscripts submitted to Frontiers receive in depth review from qualified expert reviewers and editors. Full peer review includes both ‘Independent Review’ and ‘Interactive Review’ phases. In the Independent Review phase – more like traditional peer review - each reviewer prepares a report on a manuscript and the editor considers these reports in deciding on the level of revision required. The ‘Interactive Review’ phase, which is unique to Frontiers, follows Independent Review and allows authors and reviewers to correspond directly, with the goal of improving the manuscript a much as is reasonably achievable. Full Review is carried out when novel data, techniques, methods, etc., are presented and thereby require detailed validation. Article types subject to full peer review are:

• Original Research Articles
• Methods Articles
• Hypothesis & Theory Articles
• Review Articles
• Mini Review Articles
• Clinical Case Study Articles
• Focused Reviews Articles

Short reviews are applied to manuscripts that do not require extensive validation. The Independent Review phase is skipped, and Interactive Review is immediately activated. The Associate Editor will review the manuscript, and may choose to invite one or more additional reviewers. Any reviewers and the editor will give feedback directly in the Interactive Review Forum. Article types subject to short peer review are:

• Opinion Articles
• Editorial
• Commentaries (General and Frontiers)
• Book Reviews

You can assign Review Editors by logging into your Frontiers account, visiting the manuscript’s Review Forum, and clicking on "assign reviewers."

Yes. Manuscripts submitted to Frontiers can be reviewed by qualified external expert reviewers who are not currently members of a Frontiers Editorial Board.

The Review Forum is a unique Frontiers invention, designed to facilitate the review process. All interactions between authors and editors takes place within the forum - a virtual space where authors can interact with reviewers and editors to discuss points of interest, with the goal of improving a paper, and moving discussion forward in an efficient, effective, and collegial manner. Editors, reviewers and authors can also take administrative actions, such as manuscript resubmission or reviewer invitation, through their respective portal to the Frontiers Review Forum.

Independent Review is the first of two phases in Frontiers ‘full review’. In this phase, individual expert reviewers prepare their evaluation of a manuscript according to a standardized review template. When all reviewers have prepared their independent reviewer reports, the Associate Editor can activate the Interactive Review.

All manuscripts submitted to Frontiers undergo Interactive Review. For manuscripts undergoing full review, Interactive Review follows the Independent Review phase. For short review, the Interactive Review phase commences upon submission.

Within the interactive review forum, authors can read the reviewers’ comments, reply to those comments, and resubmit new manuscript files. Authors and reviewers can engage in detailed dialogue until convergence is reached, and editors can intervene and moderate at any point. Once at least two reviewers finalize a review, the Associate Editor has permission to accept a manuscript for publication.

You can access your manuscript’s review reports directly through the Review Forum.

Enter the article’s Review Forum under ‘My Review Assignments’. Author comments are visible in the main body of the page, threaded in response to your review comments.

The decision to accept a manuscript for publication is taken by the Associate Editor. The associate editor must take into consideration the reviewers’ comments, reviewers’ endorsement, and the authors’ ability to revise the manuscript (if needed) before taking the decision.

However, rejection can only be approved in consultation with the chief editor. An Associate Editor can - if reviewers and authors fail to reach agreement, or if two reviewers withdraw - recommend a manuscript for rejection. This recommendation must then be confirmed by the Specialty Chief Editor.

No. Any reviewer who endorses publication of a manuscript in Frontiers must have their identity listed on the published article. If a review editor is unwilling to have their name listed on a published article, they must decline to review before accepting a review invitation, or withdraw from review if they have already undertaken the review assignment.

On average, the review process takes around 30 days from submission to activation of the interactive review, and 60 days to reach a decision, for a total of 90 days. This is one of the fastest review processes in scholarly publishing.

When an editor determines, upon evaluating independent review reports, that only minor manuscript revisions are required before publication, Frontiers allows immediate online publication of the paper’s abstract as a “Paper Pending.” This allows a pressure-free collaboration between authors and reviewers as revisions are made and discussed, while removing any concern that the authors’ discovery might be ‘scooped’ while review is ongoing.

Research Topics have become popular trademarks of the Frontiers Journals Series: they are collections of at least ten articles of any tier 1 article type, and are centered on hot topics in a particular research area.

The Specialty Chief Editor of the section in which you aim to host the topic in approves your proposal.

Research Topics may comprise any Frontiers tier 1 article types.

When setting deadlines for your Research Topic, keep in mind that participation announcements need to be sent, abstracts need to be submitted, notifications to the authors must be sent regarding the approval of their abstracts, and full articles need to be prepared. The editorial office suggests a minimum of two months from the day the topic announcement is sent to potential contributors, to the date of abstract submission. We also suggest at least a further three months until the date of full article submission.

All articles contributing to a Research Topic are reviewed in accordance with standard Frontiers Review.

No. Some research topics have received more than 50 papers!

The article publishing fee for authors is steeply discounted for Research Topic articles. You can find a complete table of publishing fees here.

The advantages for the host editor are manifold – both at a professional and a personal level. It is a great opportunity to boost the visibility of your research interests, and to provide a broad perspective on the latest advances in your area – tailored by your personal approach to the topic. Hosting a Research Topic is also a great opportunity to unite the best researchers in your area and intensify collaborations.

Please see this page for details on steps involved in proposing and hosting a Frontiers Research Topic."

Yes. Having more than one topic editor is advantageous, since editorial responsibilities can be shared.

Yes. As a Topic Editor, you may submit an article to your Research Topic, but another Frontiers editor will serve as the handling editor for your manuscript’s peer review process. You may also submit an editorial, to be published after the Research Topic is closed.

As editor of a Frontiers Research Topic, you have all the rights, responsibilities and obligations of a Frontiers associate editor, with the exception of inviting Review Editors to the Frontiers board. Your responsibilities when handing an individual manuscript are exactly the same as those of a Frontiers Associate Editor. Additionally, a Topic Editor is responsible for promoting their research topic to colleagues and encouraging their participation.