Five-year plan

Frederick Fenter, Executive Editor

Open access is the expectation

Frontiers is a player in innovation

• Article level metrics

• Reviewer recognition

• Platform development

• Peer-review process

• Profiles and research networking

Products and services require data

2000 “The Database is the journal !”2015 “The Journal is one view of the database !”

Impactful papers are less concentrated

“[…] throughout most of the 20th century the link between the IF and papers’ citations was growing stronger, but, as predicted, this link has been weakening steadily since the beginning of the digital age.”

G.A. Lozano, V. Larivière, Y. Gingras, “The Weakening Relationship Between

the Impact Factor and Papers’ Citations in the Digital Age,” JASIST, 63(11):2140–2145 (2012).

Content is international, interdisciplinary, collaborative

Adams, J. (2013). Collaborations: The fourth age of research. Nature 497, 557-560 (30 May 2013)

Social Media influences impact

Nature 512, 126–129 (14 August 2014) doi:10.1038/512126a

Open Science moving to Data and Code

Content will be text-and-data minable

Journals

0

20,000

40,000

60,000

80,000

100,000

120,000

140,000

160,000

180,000

Specialty Sections: where are the gaps?

Specialty Section Expansion

0

50

100

150

200

250

300

350

400

2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

Humanities and Social Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

• Subject areas will include Sociology, Library and Information Science, Communications, Business, and Management

• Schools of thought need to be considered

• Fees for Open Access

• Monographic

Ready for open access !

Frontiers (the Magazine)

• The summit of the Tiering mechanism

• Editorial Board of Frontiers Chief Editors

• Will accept direct submissions, too

• All open access, no APCs

Frontiers (the Magazine)

Coming in 2016

Research Topics build Journals

• Collaborative• International• Interdisciplinary

Research Topics build Journals

• Ultimate niche publication• Flexible, aesthetic, functional• Social • Reopening successful topics

A focus for platform development

Research Topics: Quality Control

(1) Potential Topic Editors vetted by in-house team

(2) All Topic Editors and Topics approved by Specialty Chief Editors

(3) Associate Editor “oversight” assignment

(4) Full access to monitoring tools

(5) Final validation stage for all papers

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

18 Frontiers journals have Impact Factorsand rank highly in their JCR categories – despite large publishing volumes!

3.62.9

3.94.2 4.2 3.1 4.2

3.8 3.83.4

2.6 3.1 3.0 2.9 2.8 2.1

2.2

3.4

Case study: Frontiers in Psychology

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

140

160

180

200

Spontaneous

RT

Case Study: Frontiers in Microbiology

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

140

Spontaneous

RT

Case Study: Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

Spontaneous

RT

Case Study: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

Spontaneous

RT

Case Study: Frontiers in Pharmacology

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

Spontaneous

RT

Case Study: Frontiers in Marine Science

0

5

10

15

20

25

Spontaneous

RT

Editorial Boards

(1) Engages the community

(2) Maps the community across all specialties

(3) Allows Frontiers to provide a better service

(4) Expansion into new markets (China)

(5) Expansion of existing boards (AEs and REs)

(6) Editors as Authors

Projection: Articles published USA and China

0

100,000

200,000

300,000

400,000

500,000

600,000

700,000

800,000

900,000

1,000,000

2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 2018 2020

China United States

Frontiers: Submissions from China

0

100

200

300

400

500

600

700

2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

Editorial Board Expansions

0

10,000

20,000

30,000

40,000

50,000

60,000

2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

Total Editors

Total Editors

22%

140% 76%

290%

92%20%

42%

47%

Editors as authors (Editor participation rate)

0

10,000

20,000

30,000

40,000

50,000

60,000

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

14%

16%

18%

18%16%

16%

27%

Editors as Authors (as Percent of submissions)

0

2,000

4,000

6,000

8,000

10,000

12,000

14,000

16,000

2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

Non-Editors

Editors

46%52%56%60%68%76%

Case Study: Microbiology Submissions

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

140

160

180

200

Non-Editors

Editors

Platform Improvements

(1) Evolving web environment

(2) Quality controls reinforced

(3) Dashboard views

(4) Semantic selections

(5) Plugging into Loop

(6) Text and data mining

Evolving Internet Service

Quality Controls reinforced

(1) Associate Editor control of selection

(2) Semantic algorithms in AE selection

(3) Grouping of AEs together into areas of competence

(4) Dashboard view of manuscript listing

(5) Final validation stage

Semantic selectionsNew manuscript

submitted

We extract the title and the abstract

We search in our confirmed publications database the closest

publications to the one submitted

Then, from that results we extract the authors and aggregate the score for each of them and we propose the most suitable reviewers

Profile completion is critical !

Plugging into Loop

Dashboard Views

Text and Data Mining through APIs

“OpenMinTed aspires to the creation of an infrastructure that fosters and facilitates the use of text mining technologies in the scientific publications world […]”

Marketing the message

Frontiers Blog

Support by Jacobs Foundation as of April 2014

Fully linked to Frontiers journals

Financial, Editorial and IT support

Young Minds Blog on Scientific American as of October 2014

Frontiers Science Heroes

Conference participation

Frontiers Travel Awards

30 Awards of € 3’000 go to

10 Specialty Chief Editors

8 Associate Editors

8 Review Editors

4 Guest Associate Editors

Conclusions

(1) Content will be tightly integrated into social networks

(2) Research Topics will lead trends in interdisciplinary research

(3) Open Science principles will be broadly accepted

(4) Technology + data is the winning formula

Thanks!