397 news posts in Top news

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20 Sep 2016

The Retraction Procedure at Frontiers

by Gearoid Faolean, Frontiersin.org As an academic publisher, Frontiers utilizes peer review to ensure academic rigor is applied to all manuscripts submitted to our journals. Frontiers system of peer review, using our unique Collaborative Review Forum and supplemented by a number of in-house quality checks, ensures quality at scale and has a high satisfaction rate among its users. Despite a rigorous process and clear criteria for acceptance and rejection of manuscripts, no system is entirely fool proof and retractions are an occasional and unfortunate, but necessary, resort for some published papers. Articles are retracted in proven cases of scientific misconduct, major errors – including honest – and various forms of publishing malfeasance listed below. Retractions are first and foremost about correcting the scientific literature and ensuring the integrity of published research. As a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), Frontiers abides by their guidelines and recommendations in cases of potential retraction. Frontiers also abides by two other key principles, as recommended by COPE: Retractions are not about punishing authors. Retraction statements should be public and linked to the original, retracted article. While all potential retractions are subject to an internal investigation and will be judged on their own […]

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21 Aug 2016

Frontiers publishes its 50,000th article

Frontiers has reached a major milestone and published its 50,000th article. Frontiers was born digital as an open-access publisher in 2007. It has grown to become the home to 57 journals covering sciences, technology and the humanities that span across 440 specialty sections. More than 150’000 authors have published with Frontiers journals. Community driven, our editorial board is the largest in the world, consisting of over 63,000 researchers from the most prestigious universities. Frontiers journals have risen to become some of the most-citied open-access journals in their fields. We have also pioneered the collaborative peer-review, crowd-sourced metrics and created our own unique in-house Digital Editorial Office to ensure quality at scale. Pioneering the Collaborative Peer Review Our Collaborative Peer Review is the first of its kind and mandates that all reviews are impact neutral, meaning we publish all research that is correct. Each manuscript undergoes rigorous and constructive feedback from expert reviewers who have direct interactions with the authors. The reviewers and editors are also acknowledged on the published articles. This combination of transparency, collaboration and applying an impact neutral philosophy has become a powerful model for publishing quality academic papers at scale. Freeing the flow of knowledge and enabling correct and […]

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04 Mar 2016

New Data Debunks Old Beliefs: Part 2

Our original New data debunks old beliefs blog post plotted the impact factors of 570 randomly selected journals indexed in the 2014 Journal Citation Reports (Thomson Reuters, 2015), against their publicly stated rejection rates. The goal was to understand the relationship between rejection rates and journal quality. Despite a widespread belief that high rejection rates secure high impact factors, no significant correlation was found. This study was preliminary, to start a discussion, because it suggests that such an entrenched belief may be wrong. This blog post is going one step further by removing what could be the main reason why we could not find any correlation: varying citation rates across academic fields. It is widely known that articles in some fields typically get more citations than in other fields. Perhaps a correlation would become evident once we removed this variable. In Figures 1-7 below, we normalized the impact factors by field, thus effectively removing this variable from the results (data accessible here). We have done this by calculating the ranking of each journal within its own Journal Citation Reports category (or field). As an example, a journal that has the 4th largest IF among 200 journals in its category will […]

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27 Jan 2016

Changing ways: High impact, fast decisions and reasonable rejection rates in scholarly publishing

Rejection rates in Frontiers journals are around ~27%, most manuscripts are published within 3 months, and yet, Frontiers’ citations rates are amongst the very highest.

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21 Dec 2015

Selecting for impact: new data debunks old beliefs

One of the strongest beliefs in scholarly publishing is that journals seeking a high impact factor (IF) should be highly selective, accepting only papers predicted to become highly significant and novel, and hence likely to attract a large number of citations. The result is that so-called top journals reject as many of 90-95% of the manuscripts they receive, forcing the authors of these papers to resubmit in more “specialized”, lower impact factor journals where they may find a more receptive home. Unfortunately, most of the 20,000 or so journals in the scholarly publishing world follow their example. All of which raises the question: does the strategy work? There is evidence that proves it doesn’t. In Figure 1, we plotted the impact factors of 570 randomly selected journals indexed in the 2014 Journal Citation Reports (Thomson Reuters, 2015), against their publicly stated rejection rates. Figure 1: 570 journals with publicly stated rejection rates (for sources, see below and to see complete data, click here). Impact factors from Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports (2014). (Y-axis is on a Log scale). As you can see, Figure 1 shows there is absolutely no correlation between rejection rates and impact factor (r2 = 0.0023; we assume the sample of 570 journals is sufficiently random to represent the […]

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07 Oct 2015

New specialty section “Structural Sensing” now open for submissions!

We are pleased to announce the launch of the latest specialty section for Frontiers in Built Environment, Structural Sensing. Led by Specialty Chief Editor Prof Ian F. C. Smith of ÉPFL, Switzerland, and the Future Cities Laboratory (FCL), Singapore, the editorial board is also presently composed of the following Associate Editors: Emin Ahmet Aktan (Drexel University, USA) Nizar Bel Hadj Ali (Ecole Nationale d’Ingénieurs de Gabes, Tunisia) James Mark William Brownjohn (University of Exeter, UK) Fikret Necati Catbas (University of Central Florida, USA) Eleni N. Chatzi (ETH Zürich, Switzerland) Bernd Domer (Hepia, Switzerland) Branko Glisic (Princeton University, USA) C.G. Koh (National University of Singapore, Singapore) Babak Moaveni (Tufts University, USA) Franklin L. Moon (Drexel University, USA) Hae Young Noh (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) Shamim Pakzad (Lehigh University, USA) Costas Papadimitriou (University of Thessaly, Greece) Benny Raphael (IIT Madras, India) Landolf Rhode-Barbarigos (University of Miami, USA) Andrew Smyth (Columbia University, USA) Scope: Trends of increasing availability of sensors with near infinite and inexpensive data-storage possibilities have created new opportunities for structural engineers. These trends have been reinforced by developments in optical-fiber technology that provides signal stability over long periods of time. Furthermore, wireless and energy-harvesting technologies have the potential to greatly facilitate many installation challenges. Structural engineers currently need such […]

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16 Sep 2015

New specialty section “Sustainable Design and Construction” now open for submissions

Frontiers in Built Environment is very happy to announce the launch of the journal’s latest section – “Sustainable Design and Construction“, under the stewardship of Specialty Chief Editor, Prof Nyuk Hien WONG (National University of Singapore), pictured. This specialty section will be dedicated to publishing new and important findings in the field of sustainable design and construction; to provide a platform for academia and industry practitioners to share their latest research and practices in the field. While the principal focus will be on buildings, papers and topics of interest can also cover the urban and infrastructure environment. For more information on the section and the Editorial Board, click here. Submissions are welcome on any of the following topics: • Advanced Green Building Systems, Construction Technologies and Materials • Passive Green Building Design and Construction • Zero Energy and Zero Carbon Building Design and Construction • Use of Renewable Energy sources for Building Design and Construction • Smart Building Design and Construction • Smart, Sustainable and Resilient Urban Planning and Cities • Sustainable Design and Construction for Comfort, Health and Well-being • Advanced Modeling Techniques for Green Building and Urban Environment Frontiers in Built Environment is part of Frontiers open-science platform and research network, and one of our newest journals, having launched in […]