Is Frontiers Peer Reviewed, Credible, Legit?

Q: What was the 2024 Frontiers AI figure controversy?

In February 2024, a paper in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology was published containing AI-generated figures depicting anatomically nonsensical, fabricated imagery. It drew widespread public attention before being retracted, and is frequently cited as an example of insufficient editorial scrutiny at the figure-review stage.

Frontiers is a real publisher running real peer review, and it has a more contested integrity record than most publishers its size. Both of those are true, and you need both to answer the question you are actually asking. Frontiers Media journals require peer review before publication, Frontiers is not on Beall’s list or any comparable current predatory-publisher reference, and it holds COPE and OASPA membership. It also removed all 31 editors from two of its medical journals in 2015 after an editorial-independence dispute, was listed by Jeffrey Beall as potentially predatory that same year, and — most recently and most seriously — retracted 122 articles in July 2025 after its own integrity team uncovered a network of roughly 35 authors manipulating peer review across many publishers. This page separates what is documented from what is often overstated, and ends with how to judge one specific Frontiers journal rather than the publisher as a whole.

Last verified 23 August 2026. Retraction counts move; the July 2025 figures below are Frontiers’ own, as published in its 29 July 2025 statement.

What Frontiers Is

Frontiers Media SA is a fully open-access academic publisher founded in 2007 by neuroscientists Kamila and Henry Markram, headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland. It publishes several hundred peer-reviewed journals across the sciences, funded through article processing charges (APCs) rather than reader subscriptions — the same business model used by other large open-access publishers such as MDPI, Cureus and Hindawi. Springer Nature’s parent, Nature Publishing Group (NPG), acquired a controlling interest in Frontiers in February 2013; that relationship ended in 2015 amid the editorial-independence dispute described below. Frontiers is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), both of which set conduct and membership standards for scholarly publishers.

How Frontiers’s Peer Review Process Works

Frontiers uses what it calls a “collaborative review” process, structured in two phases. In the independent review phase, an assigned handling editor and independent reviewers evaluate the manuscript separately, as in a conventional review process. In the interactive review phase, authors and reviewers are brought into a shared online forum where they can respond to each other’s comments directly and iterate on revisions in real time, rather than passing revisions back through an editor across sequential rounds. Frontiers states that reviewers’ identities are disclosed to authors during this interactive phase (not held anonymous the way single-anonymized review typically works), and reviewers who approve a published article are named on the final publication. A handling editor, not Frontiers staff, makes the final accept/reject decision. For the underlying vocabulary this page draws on — what “single-anonymized” and “open” review mean and how they differ — see CASRAI’s single-anonymized peer review entry, the Frontiers collaborative peer review entry, and the ANSI/NISO Z39.106-2023 peer review terminology standard that formalized these terms.

The Documented Controversies

Several distinct episodes get conflated in casual claims about Frontiers. Treated separately, with what’s actually documented for each:

The 2025 Peer-Review Manipulation Network — 122 Retractions

This is the most recent, the largest, and the one that matters most if you are evaluating Frontiers now. On 29 July 2025, Frontiers’ Research Integrity Auditing team published a statement saying it had confirmed the “unethical actions” of a coordinated network in 122 articles across five Frontiers journals, and that all 122 were being retracted. In Frontiers’ own words, the investigation found “a broad and sophisticated network of about 35 authors were potentially colluding over a very large number of journals and published papers, a fraction of which were published by Frontiers.” The mechanism was peer review conducted with undisclosed conflicts of interest, combined with citation manipulation — not the wholesale fabrication or sale of manuscripts.

Frontiers also stated that the same network accounted for more than 4,000 articles published across seven other publishers that, in its assessment, “would justify further scrutiny.” That figure is important context: this was a cross-publisher network that happened to be exposed at Frontiers, not a problem confined to Frontiers’ journals.

Three details change how the episode should be read:

Frontiers’ own transparency is what made detection possible. The investigation began when a reader noticed a probable undisclosed conflict of interest in the peer review of a single article. That was only visible because Frontiers publishes the names of reviewers alongside each accepted article. Under fully anonymous review, the same pattern would have been invisible to an outside reader.
Most of the affected papers date from 2022. Frontiers stated that the majority of the retracted articles were published that year, before its AIRA screening system verified the conflict-of-interest statements of reviewers and handling editors — a check Frontiers says it has since added.
A retraction in this batch is not a finding of misconduct against every author on the paper. The retraction notices state that the investigation “was not able to determine whether all authors, editors, or reviewers were aware of or involved in the misconduct,” while concluding that the integrity of the review process could not be guaranteed. If you are assessing a specific researcher’s record, that distinction is the whole point.

CASRAI’s full account — the per-journal breakdown of all 122 retractions, how the network was traced, and why it is a reviewer-collusion ring rather than a classic paper mill — is in Frontiers’ 122-Article Retraction: Inside a 35-Author Peer-Review Collusion Network. For the underlying categories, see peer review fraud and paper mill.

Beall’s List (2015)

Frontiers was added to Jeffrey Beall’s list of potentially predatory publishers in October 2015. Frontiers publicly disputed the listing; the following year it pressed the University of Colorado Denver to have Beall retract the characterization. Beall’s blacklist was taken down entirely in January 2017, with reporting at the time citing pressure from Frontiers, among other factors, as part of the context for that shutdown. Frontiers has not appeared on directly comparable successor predatory-publisher lists since.

The 2015 Editorial Board Removal

In May 2015, Frontiers removed the entire editorial boards — 31 editors in total — of two of its medical titles, Frontiers in Medicine and Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine. The editors involved said Frontiers staff had interfered with editorial decisions in ways that violated core principles of editorial independence in medical publishing, and some editors reported the dispute had already driven prior resignations from Frontiers journals. Frontiers’s own public position was that it was defending distributed editorial governance against a faction of editors. Nature Publishing Group ended its ownership stake and collaboration with Frontiers that same year. This episode is specific to two medical journals in 2015, not a claim about Frontiers’s several-hundred-journal portfolio today.

Rejection Rates and Acceptance-Rate Criticism

Frontiers has faced sustained, recurring criticism — including reporting on individual editors describing pressure over rejection rates — that its editorial incentive structure favors acceptance, given that revenue is tied to published articles under the APC model. This is a structural criticism that applies, to varying degrees, to every APC-funded open-access publisher, not a finding unique to Frontiers, but it has been raised about Frontiers specifically and repeatedly enough to be worth naming directly rather than waving away.

High-Profile Flawed Publications

Frontiers journals have published and later retracted or corrected a number of specific articles that drew significant outside scrutiny, including papers making scientifically discredited claims (such as HIV/AIDS denialism and vaccine-autism links) and, in February 2024, a Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology paper containing AI-generated figures with fabricated, anatomically nonsensical content that circulated widely before the article was retracted. Isolated flawed publications occur at journals across the industry and are not, on their own, evidence that a publisher lacks peer review generally — but the volume and profile of these specific Frontiers episodes is well documented and is a legitimate part of why the publisher draws more scrutiny than most.

Is Frontiers Credible? Is It Predatory?

These are two different questions and they have two different answers.

Predatory: no, not by the definition the field uses. See CASRAI’s predatory journal entry — a predatory journal is characterized by the absence of genuine peer review behind a publication-fee business model, typically combined with deceptive practices about editorial boards, indexing, or fees. Frontiers does not meet that definition on the current record: it operates a disclosed, structured review process, it is not on Beall’s list or its direct continuation, and it maintains COPE and OASPA membership.

Credible: conditionally, and at the level of the individual journal rather than the publisher. Frontiers has a genuinely more contested reputation than most large open-access publishers, driven by real, specific, documented episodes — the 2015 Beall’s listing and editorial-board removal, the 2024 AI-figure case, and the 2025 retraction of 122 articles tied to a review-manipulation network. Set against that, its integrity team found and disclosed that network itself, published the finding, named the scale of the cross-publisher problem, and changed its screening in response. A publisher that detects and publicly reports a collusion ring inside its own journals is behaving differently from one that conceals it. “Frontiers” is not a single quality level in any case: the portfolio spans several hundred journals with independent editorial boards, and the useful judgement is always about the specific title, its editors, and its indexing — not the imprint on the cover.

How to Judge One Specific Frontiers Journal

The Frontiers-wide facts above are context. If you are deciding whether to submit to, cite, or trust a particular Frontiers title, these are the checks that actually settle it:

Check current indexing for that exact title. Look the journal up by name or ISSN in Clarivate’s free Master Journal List and in Scopus. Indexing is assessed per journal, not per publisher. CASRAI’s guide on why journals get delisted from Web of Science covers what a removal does and does not imply.
Look at the editorial board, not the brand. Are the named editors real, findable researchers publishing in the field? Frontiers lists boards publicly, which makes this fast.
Check whether the specific article sits in a Research Topic. Frontiers’ guest-edited “Research Topics” are the structure the 2025 network exploited, and guest-edited collections are a recognised weak point across the industry — see guest editor vetting and CASRAI’s guide to guest-editing a special issue.
Check the article itself for a retraction or expression of concern in the Retraction Watch Database and via CrossMark on the publisher’s page. If you are citing something that turns out to be retracted, CASRAI covers what to do in when a paper you cite gets retracted.
Apply the general test, not the brand test. CASRAI’s How to Know If an Article Is Peer Reviewed and the guide to identifying predatory journals and publishers set out the checks that distinguish a genuinely predatory operation from a legitimate publisher that attracts criticism.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is frontiersin.org credible?

Frontiersin.org is the legitimate website of Frontiers Media SA, a Swiss open-access publisher founded in 2007 with several hundred journals, COPE and OASPA membership, and a disclosed peer review process. It is not a hijacked or fake domain. Credibility at the article level is a separate question: Frontiers has a more contested integrity record than most publishers its size, including 122 retractions in July 2025 tied to a peer-review manipulation network, so judge the specific journal and article rather than the domain.

Is Frontiers legit?

Yes, in the sense that matters for most people asking: it is a real publisher, the journals are really peer reviewed, many Frontiers titles are indexed in Web of Science and Scopus, and articles published there count as peer-reviewed publications. It is not a scam operation. That is compatible with the documented controversies on this page, which are about editorial rigor and integrity failures at a real publisher, not about whether the publisher exists.

Did Frontiers retract 122 articles in 2025?

Yes. Frontiers announced on 29 July 2025 that it had confirmed coordinated misconduct in 122 articles across five of its journals and was retracting them, after its Research Integrity Auditing team traced a network of about 35 authors conducting peer review with undisclosed conflicts of interest and manipulating citations. Frontiers said the same network was linked to more than 4,000 further articles across seven other publishers. Full detail in CASRAI’s report on the case.

Is Frontiers a legitimate publisher?

Yes, by the standard markers used to assess publisher legitimacy: it operates a disclosed peer review process, is a COPE and OASPA member, and is not on Beall’s list or comparable current predatory-publisher references. It is also a publisher with a more contested reputation than most, driven by specific, well-documented episodes. Both facts can be true together.

Was Frontiers ever classified as predatory?

Yes, in the sense that it was added to Jeffrey Beall’s list of potentially predatory publishers in October 2015. Frontiers disputed the listing, and Beall’s blacklist was taken offline entirely in January 2017; pressure from Frontiers was reported at the time as part of the context for that shutdown. It has not appeared on directly comparable successor lists since.

What happened with Frontiers’s editorial boards in 2015?

Frontiers removed all 31 editors from two medical journals, Frontiers in Medicine and Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine, after a dispute over editorial independence. Nature Publishing Group, which had held a controlling stake in Frontiers since 2013, ended that relationship the same year.

What is “collaborative review” at Frontiers?

It’s Frontiers’s two-phase peer review model: an independent review phase where reviewers assess the manuscript separately, followed by an interactive phase where authors and reviewers communicate directly in a shared online forum to resolve issues, rather than passing revisions through an editor across sequential closed rounds. Reviewers who approve a published article are named on it — the feature that made the 2025 network detectable.

Is Frontiers’s high acceptance rate a sign it isn’t rigorous?

Frontiers has faced recurring criticism, including from some of its own former editors, that its APC-funded revenue model creates pressure toward acceptance. That’s a structural critique that applies in some degree to any APC-funded open-access publisher, but it has been raised about Frontiers specifically and repeatedly, and is a legitimate factor to weigh alongside a specific journal’s editorial board and track record.

What was the 2024 Frontiers AI figure controversy?

In February 2024, a paper in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology was published containing AI-generated figures depicting anatomically nonsensical, fabricated imagery. It drew widespread public attention before being retracted, and is frequently cited as an example of insufficient editorial scrutiny at the figure-review stage.

My paper was retracted in the 2025 batch. Does that mean I committed misconduct?

Not on the face of the notice. Frontiers’ retraction notices for this batch state explicitly that the investigation “was not able to determine whether all authors, editors, or reviewers were aware of or involved in the misconduct” — the ground for retraction was loss of confidence in the peer review process, not a finding against each named author. CASRAI covers the career and reporting consequences for uninvolved co-authors in how a co-author’s misconduct retraction affects innocent collaborators, and the correction-versus-retraction distinction in correction (corrigendum).

Related CASRAI Resources

For the journal-level metric behind this question, see the Frontiers in Immunology impact factor entry, which records the figure alongside its Journal Citation Reports edition.

See also: AI-Generated figures in manuscripts — Authors, not AI tools, are accountable for every figure regardless of how it was made.

Is Frontiers Peer Reviewed, Credible, or Legit?