Is Frontiers a Predatory Journal? What the Evidence Says About Frontiers Journals

Few publisher names provoke as much argument in a department corridor as Frontiers. One colleague will tell you it is a perfectly respectable open access house with fast, transparent review. Another will say they would never put a Frontiers paper on a promotion file. Search interest in the question has been climbing again this autumn, and the honest answer is less satisfying than either camp wants: Frontiers is not a predatory publisher, but it is not a uniform, risk-free one either.

This guide separates three things that get blurred in the online debate. The first is whether Frontiers fits the definition of a predatory publisher. The second is what has actually gone wrong at Frontiers, including the July 2025 retraction batch and the decision by Finland's Publication Forum to downgrade many of its titles. The third is the practical question that matters to you as an author: how to judge one particular Frontiers journal before you commit a manuscript to it.

A note on sourcing. I could read search summaries and secondary commentary for this piece, but could not open every primary page directly, so figures are given as reported and flagged where they differ between sources. Check the linked publisher and agency pages yourself before you rely on any number here.

What "Predatory" Actually Means, and Why Frontiers Does Not Fit It

The term predatory journal is usually applied to outlets that charge fees while providing little or no genuine peer review, hide their fees until after acceptance, invent editorial boards, make false claims about indexing, or spam researchers with flattering invitations. A 2019 international consensus definition published in Nature described such journals as entities that prioritise self-interest at the expense of scholarship, characterised by false or misleading information, deviation from best editorial and publication practices, a lack of transparency, and aggressive solicitation. Those are behaviours, not business models.

Measured against that definition, Frontiers does not match. It was founded in the late 2000s as a researcher-led open access publisher, operates a real editorial and review infrastructure, discloses its article processing charges, and is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), according to the commentary I reviewed. Many of its journals are indexed in PubMed and listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. You can confirm each of those claims in under ten minutes, and you should do it for the specific title you have in mind.

The confusion arises because "predatory" has become a loose insult for anything that is open access, author-pays, and high volume. Those features overlap with predatory practice without being evidence of it. Several large, respectable publishers use the same model. What distinguishes a predatory outlet is deception and absent review, and the evidence for that at Frontiers is thin.

Where the Reputation Problem Comes From

Frontiers has carried the label before. Jeffrey Beall added the publisher to his well-known list of potentially predatory publishers in 2015, and the episode became a public dispute. Beall took the list down in 2017. Accounts of what followed come mostly from commentators rather than neutral records, so I would treat the details with care. What is safe to say is that a Beall listing today carries little weight, because the list was unsystematic, is no longer maintained, and was criticised for treating a business model as a verdict.

A more durable source of suspicion is the publisher's scale and speed. Frontiers publishes tens of thousands of articles a year across a very large portfolio of journals, many of them organised as sections of broader titles. Rapid turnaround and high volume make some readers uneasy, and volume does raise the odds that weak papers or compromised review slip through. That is a quality-control argument. It is a different claim from saying the whole enterprise is fraudulent.

The model itself also draws criticism. Frontiers has used an interactive review forum in which reviewers and authors communicate during revision, and reviewer names are published on accepted papers. Supporters call this transparent and constructive. Critics worry that a collaborative, author-reviewer dialogue can drift toward accommodation. Neither view has been settled by strong comparative evidence, so I would not use the format as a reason to submit or to stay away.

The July 2025 Retractions: What Happened and What It Does Not Show

The strongest recent evidence against Frontiers is also the most specific. In July 2025, Retraction Watch reported that Frontiers was retracting 122 articles across five journals after an internal investigation found a network of roughly 35 authors and editors involved in peer review conducted with undisclosed conflicts of interest and in citation manipulation. The journals named included Frontiers in Psychology, Frontiers in Environmental Science, Frontiers in Energy Research, Frontiers in Public Health, and Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. The investigation could not establish whether every individual involved knew about the misconduct.

Two details deserve attention. First, the publisher said it had traced thousands of further articles linked to the same network in journals owned by other companies, with the figure reported as more than 4,000 across seven other publishers. In other words, the problem was not confined to Frontiers, and the publisher that investigated and published the findings was, in that respect, doing what a responsible publisher is expected to do. Second, earlier Frontiers retraction batches were smaller, with reported figures of about a dozen papers in one year and about 40 in 2023, some linked to the buying and selling of authorship.

None of this shows that a Frontiers paper is more likely to be unreliable than a paper from another publisher. Retraction counts rise partly because a publisher looks harder. A publisher that never retracts anything is not necessarily clean. The fair reading is narrower: peer review at some Frontiers titles was compromised by a coordinated group, the publisher acknowledged it, and authors should not assume that review at any large open access publisher is automatically sound.

Finland's Publication Forum and the Grey-Zone Label

The most consequential institutional response so far came from Finland. The Publication Forum (JUFO), which classifies publication channels used in Finnish university funding models, announced in December 2024 that from the start of 2025 it would move hundreds of journals from Frontiers and MDPI to level 0. JUFO described them as grey area journals where publication cannot be recommended without reservation, citing concerns linked to the article processing charge operating model. An earlier round in 2024 had already lowered a smaller set of journals from several publishers, including a few Frontiers titles.

Level 0 means a paper counts for less in the funding formula. It does not mean the journal is banned or its papers are invalid. Both publishers objected, with Frontiers saying JUFO had not raised concerns with it beforehand and both calling the criteria insufficiently transparent. Reported totals vary between sources, and one commentary gives a Frontiers-specific count that conflicts with the others, so use the current JUFO portal if the exact figure matters to you. Other bodies have used similar language. A French research institute was reported in 2023 to have described Frontiers as a grey-zone publisher.

Why does this matter if you are not in Finland? Because assessment rules are local and can change. If your institution, funder, or national evaluation system uses a classification list, a journal that is acceptable today can lose standing in the next review cycle. Check whether any list that affects you has already flagged the journal.

A Practical Test for Any Specific Frontiers Journal

The useful unit of analysis is the journal, and within the journal, the specialty section and the editor handling your manuscript. Frontiers titles range from long-established, well-regarded specialty journals to newer sections with thin editorial boards. A single publisher verdict will mislead you in both directions.

Start with the editorial board. Look for named editors with verifiable institutional pages, publication records in the field, and no suspicious clustering of the same few authors. Then check indexing at the source rather than on the journal's own page: search the title in PubMed, MEDLINE, and the Directory of Open Access Journals, and confirm the claim matches what those databases say. Our guide to verifying journal indexing walks through the steps.

Next, read the journal's recent retraction and correction notices. A handful of notices handled openly is a reasonable sign. A cluster tied to peer review manipulation or non-existent citations is a warning. The Retraction Watch database lets you search by journal and by publisher, and we have a separate guide on using it. Finally, open five or six recent papers in your subtopic and judge them as a reviewer would. Are the methods adequately reported? Are reporting checklists followed? Are the reference lists sensible? Your own field judgement is more reliable than any aggregated rating.

Speed, Rejection Rates, and What They Tell You

Frontiers has published figures for its own performance. In its 2021 progress report, the publisher reported an average of 77 days from submission to final decision, and said it rejected about 40 percent of submissions on average across its journals, with rates near 79 percent at some titles. It also states that it does not impose acceptance or rejection quotas. These are self-reported and now several years old, so treat them as indicative at best.

Fast review is not a problem in itself. Some excellent journals turn papers around quickly. The warning sign is speed combined with near-universal acceptance and thin reviewer reports. If you are an author, the question is whether the reports you receive engage with your methods. If they are brief and generic, that tells you something regardless of the publisher.

Authors sometimes read a lower rejection rate as a sign of looseness. That is too simple. A journal with a broad scope and a rigorous desk screen can accept a high share of the papers that reach review, because weak ones are filtered earlier. Ask what the journal checks at intake instead of leaning on a headline percentage.

Cost, Funding, and the Author-Pays Question

Frontiers is fully open access, and authors or their funders pay an article processing charge on acceptance. Charges vary by journal and article type, and they are substantial enough that you should read the current fee page before choosing a title. Many institutions and funders have agreements that cover or discount the charge, and waivers exist for some authors in lower-income countries. Our guide to article processing charges explains how these arrangements work.

The pay-on-acceptance model creates a structural incentive to accept papers. That incentive is real, and it is the reason agencies like JUFO have raised the issue. It is also true of most fully open access publishers, including many that are widely respected. The incentive is a reason for scrutiny, not proof of misconduct. What editors and review systems do with that pressure is what separates a reputable journal from a poor one.

How Evaluators May Read a Frontiers Paper

Authors worry less about the abstract question of whether Frontiers is predatory and more about how a hiring panel, promotion committee, or funder will see a Frontiers paper on their record. The honest answer is that it varies. Some committees treat the journal as any other indexed open access outlet and read the paper. Others apply local lists or informal bias. In countries that use classification lists for funding, a level 0 designation can have a direct financial effect.

You can reduce this risk. Choose a journal with a strong editorial board in your specialty, make sure the paper is thorough and fully reported, and be ready to defend the venue choice in a sentence. If your institution has a published list or policy, read it before submitting. If you are unsure, ask a senior colleague or the research office, who will usually know of local rules faster than any website.

What to Do Before You Submit

Treat the question as a due diligence task and not a moral one. Confirm the exact journal and section, verify indexing at the source, read recent notices, check local classification lists, and find the fee and waiver terms. Write down what you found. If an editor or reviewer later asks why you chose the venue, you will have a clear and defensible answer.

If something looks wrong, such as an unsolicited invitation that promises guaranteed acceptance, an editorial board you cannot verify, or a fee that appears only after acceptance, stop. Those are the behaviours that define genuinely predatory outlets, and they are worth far more attention than a publisher's name. For everything else, the realistic position is the uncomfortable middle: Frontiers is a legitimate publisher with uneven journals, a documented integrity problem it has publicly addressed, and a reputation that will keep drawing different judgments from different readers.

The practical implication is simple. Do not accept or reject Frontiers on reputation alone. Spend ten minutes testing the specific journal against the checks above, and submit only if it passes.

Further Reading