Frontiers reviews

Salaries are quite low by Swiss standards. A lot of mismatch between job roles and people's expertise. Eg. Some journal managers have very limited knowledge of the wider publishing landscape and their targets and job role is very much about number crunching rather than ensuring academic excellence. I have seen a lot of unprofessional egotism and bullying in this company as although Frontiers is seen as an easy way into scientific publishing, some people seem to think they are exceptional, and a law onto themselves, because they work at Frontiers. This distracts from how Frontiers is still developing its distinctiveness as a publisher and frankly faces many of the same challenges as other publishing houses. This comes back to how although Frontiers is growing as a publisher, the company sacrifices numbers for actual innovation and academic excellence. Eg. A lot of the Editorial boards need cleaning but this gets pushed to the side in favour of number crunching. There are also a lot of privileged people, particularly British and Italian, who work in this company. This comes across in how some people claim authority over absolutely menial tasks. Also, I have heard unsolicited personal details from HR staff about other people. This is seriously unimpressive and reflects how management essentially see people, especially in the lower levels, as cogs who have to compete for scraps to get promoted: Frontiers represents itself as young and dynamic but this is code for how people are replaceable and they don't care, and don't know, how to develop people's careers.

I noticed that over the past months a number of unreliable reviews, both negative (i.e., fear and loathing) and positive, have been posted here. It's a pity, as previous ones were quite thoughtful and accurate. Here are some thoughts of mine. The tasks in the editorial side of the office used to be (not sure right now, but guess can't be too different) pretty boring, mechanical, and unrewarding. Pay is low by Swiss standard but most of the crowds (precisely for that reason probably) aren't Swiss; since salary (for permanent positions) is still better than in most EU countries, low wage tends to be an overlooked issue. Crowds get more sensitive to the topic when they get acquainted with the Swiss job market situation. Some recent reviews tried to dismiss complaints about Frontiers being a predatory published. Irrespective of whether Frontiers is such a thing, it might be worth keeping in mind that the perception of the value of Frontiers has gotten worse in academia and, I guess, beyond academia. This means that what working at Frontiers adds to the marketability and appeal of your CV has also decreased. Further, whilst arguably Frontiers is not a predatory publisher, I think that there are some serious issues that need to be highlighted. Whilst Frontiers has advocated open access in the past 10 years, little to nil has been done to advocate other aspects of open science, increasing transparency of research, data-sharing, and reproducibility of findings. Competitors, like Plos, have done much better on this side.