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06 Mar 2017

Frontiers Annual Report 2016 – Another Exciting Year of Growth

Open Science, innovation and inspiration as Frontiers hits new milestones In the 21st century we face unprecedented challenges as a human race: climate change and its impacts on water, food and the environment, energy systems, population growth, poverty, global inequality and many more. Science is the motor of the world and the more open it is, the more we can innovate, invent, find solutions to these challenges and help to preserve our planet for future generations. As you will read in our 2016 Annual Report, Frontiers has taken this open science challenge head on, designing a publishing model where science can be disseminated freely, as well as pioneering online technology to make peer-review more transparent, constructive, accountable and efficient. After just nine years, we are proud at Frontiers to be the 6th largest open-access publisher worldwide, with some of the most cited journals in their fields. In 2016 we passed some remarkable milestones. Overall 56,000 articles have been published since Frontiers began, with more than 15,000 articles published in 2016 alone. There have been 227million article views and downloads from around the world, more than 3600 Research Topics have been organized on interdisciplinary themes, we now have 70,000 editors and […]

Open science and peer review

06 Mar 2017

160-million Papers and Counting: The World’s Information Deluge

Academic output has exploded over the last 100 years but how can the most relevant research be found? — by Melissa Cochrane In 2009, it’s estimated there were at least 50 million research publications floating around the coves of the internet. If you printed all of them out and put them side by side, you could go all the way around the earth. Based on the recent data, however, it appears the number of publications are at least 3 times larger than previously thought, at around 160 million, and the growth rate has increased to 0.8% per month, doubling in just over 7 years. It’s clear that the scientific world is booming with information, but how do researchers find out who, what and where is relevant to their specific fields? How on earth can we navigate all this? Kicked off two years ago, Microsoft Academic is a research project inside Microsoft Research. At its core is an artificial intelligence agent that reads all academic publications on the web to learn and automatically create a massive knowledge base, going far beyond a simple keyword-matching search to provide an overall benchmark and the context of what you’re looking for. A goal of […]

Life sciences

06 Mar 2017

In politics, does rudeness win?

A new research project wants to track if our politics is getting ruder or whether it’s the media – stupid! — Tanya Petersen “Happy New Year to all, including to my many enemies and those who have fought me and lost so badly they just don’t know what to do. Love!” This is how US President, Donald Trump kicked off the new year – a welcome to 2017 tweet with an obvious dig. Was this rude or perhaps just churlish? While a fascinating new research project about to get underway at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne won’t be studying in detail the political musings of Donald Trump it will be trying to assess whether our politics has become ruder over time. And to do this research open data is key. Led by Dr Robert West and graduate student, Seth Vanderwiltthe, the project will start by looking at the US congressional records – an un-sampled record of what people say in a certain environment. Dr West says these are the prime example of open data. They are records that have existed from the beginning, they have always been public and now they are digitally available for researchers. […]