Page 30 - IDEA Study 2 2017 Predatory journals in Scopus

of Science and have been assigned Article Influence Score (AIS) and Journal Impact
Factor (IMP) with similarly impressive results. Frontiers in Plant Science achieved
AIS of 1.302 and IMP of 4.495, which marks it in 15th place out of 209 journals
in the “Plant Sciences” field. Frontiers in Microbiology has AIS of 1.393 and IMP
of 4.165, placing it 23rd out of 123 Journals in the “Microbiology” field. Frontiers
in Behavioral Neuroscience scores AIS of 1.179 and IMP of 3.392, ranking it in 6th
place out of 51 journals in the “Behavioural Sciences” field. From the point of citation
metrics, all three have managed to build up a rather sound reputation in their
respective fields. Authors have to pay a rather lofty fee to publish in them, but similar
amounts are charged for open-access by “standard” academic journals under
the most respected publishing houses.

Jeffrey Beall has discussed the Frontiers publishing house on his blog a number
of times (Beall 2013a, 2015, 2016ab). In August 2015 he wrote that “the publisher
Frontiers is not on my list, though I do regularly receive inquiries and complaints
about it”, but by July 2016 he had reached the conclusion that “Frontiers’ peer
review process is flawed. It is stacked in favor of accepting as many papers as
possible in order to generate more revenue for the company. Frontiers is little more
than a vanity press.”, and announced his decision to mark it as predatory.9 Beall
repeatedly pointed to reports about their lax approach to peer review and pressure
on the editors to accept articles for publication. He aired the question: Why would
anybody pay such publication fees, if there are so many other journals willing to
publish a decent article for free?

Frontiers publishes 57 open-access journals, of which half are indexed in Scopus and
a third in Web of Science. It does not look like a fraudulent publisher that would
print anything for money. Not surprisingly, therefore, its inclusion on Beall's list
triggered mixed reactions in the academic community, as vindicated by the follow-up
discussions on his blog. Some welcomed his decision and contributed with their own
bad experiences, while others reproached him for opposing the open-access
publication model as such (Berger a Cirasella 2015, Crawford 2014b), for which there
is indeed some evidence (Beall 2013b,). A note in the journal Nature reported that

9Frontiers is listed on the version of Beall's list that was used in this study, which was downloaded on
1st April 2016, so this publisher must have been added to the list at least several months before the
cited blog post was published (Beall 2016b).

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