Unqualified personnel. Most people do not have even an undergraduate degree in the field they are working in, let alone a higher level degree as any respectable publishing house would. Most people there are coming from freelance jobs in the humanities with no experience in either science or publishing. These people need to make decisions on subfields within exact sciences, use and understand fairly complex software and often scientitic terms whose meaning they cannot understand. This might explain why scientists get spammed with research topic requests on completely irrelevant fields and the low quality of the papers coming out. Should any respectable scientist know who is editing their manuscripts, they would stop submitting anything to Frontiers. This is the only publishing house that hires people without a background in their respective field. Moreover, being there for longer is rewarded, and given that the people who stay are generally the ones who did not receive competing offers, most of middle to high management is formed of people who did not receive a job anywhere else. These people will willingly block any incoming talent that has any interest in publishing or technical abilities, be it by either blocking their projects or sending passive-aggressive emails correcting commas or tabs, as previous reviews pointed out. If your life ambitions and abilities are in any way above average and have achieved anything worthwhile in the past careerwise, and are still working here for more than a few months, you have only yourself to blame. Also, salary is extremely low for Switzerland which explains the level of the people accepting the position. That said, many of these people without a scientific/publishing background might do better in a different kind of position that does not require decision making at the forefront of knowledge, and this would allow qualified personnel to replace them as well.
