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Brian Owens

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Frontiers’ journals saw large scale retractions—where does that leave the publisher’s reputation with researchers?

Brian Owens · March 27, 2024 ·

Frontiers, like other for-profit open access publishers, has struggled with a perception it has low editorial standards and weak peer review. But is that true? 

In September 2023 Frontiers—one of the world’s largest open access scientific publishers, with a stable of 230 journals covering just about every field of science—retracted 38 papers. All had been linked to the “unethical practice of buying or selling authorship on research papers,” known as “authorship for sale,” in which authors, during the review process, sell coauthorship to people who have not contributed to the research. Read more in BMJ.

BMJ fraud, medicine, publishing

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