Is Frontiers Predatory? A Practical Publisher Verdict

Frontiers publishes roughly 222 journals. Of those, 121 carry JCR Impact Factors and 133 have Scopus CiteScores. The publisher is a COPE and OASPA member, and multiple journals are listed in DOAJ. Frontiers in Immunology is the official journal of the International Union of Immunological Societies, and editorial boards include NIH department heads.

APCs range from $450 to $3,400 depending on journal and article type. The publisher employs 1,400 staff across 14 countries. This is a real publishing operation, not a shell.

The concerns about Frontiers are about the model, not about fake publishing.

The recurring issues are:

• The interactive review model publishes reviewer names on accepted papers, which critics argue discourages rejection
• Associate editors can accept manuscripts without involvement from editors-in-chief, creating inconsistent standards across journals
• In 2015, Frontiers fired 31 editors who complained about staff interference with editorial decisions
• The 2025 retraction of 122 articles revealed vulnerability to organized fraud networks, though Frontiers' integrity team also identified the network
• France's Inria classified Frontiers as a grey zone publisher in 2023; a Chinese university excluded it from researcher evaluations the same year

The pattern is not fabricated science. It is a commercially driven operation where volume incentives sometimes conflict with editorial rigor, and where institutional responses have been uneven.

Frontiers is not one journal. A well-established title like Frontiers in Immunology (IF 5.9, society-backed) is a fundamentally different proposition from a newer Frontiers journal without a track record or institutional backing.

Finland's JUFO action recognized this: 22 Frontiers journals were retained at Level 1 while 78 were downgraded. Norway rates the publisher at Level 0 but assesses individual journals separately.

Broad publisher-level verdicts do not answer the actual submission question for an author.

For most authors, the useful question is:

Is this specific Frontiers journal trusted enough in my field to justify the tradeoff?

That means checking:

• whether the specific journal was downgraded by Finland or flagged by your institution
• whether the journal has a strong editorial board with recognized names in your subfield
• whether your institution or evaluation system treats Frontiers journals cautiously
• whether a society journal alternative would give your paper a better long-term signal
• whether you are comfortable with the interactive review model and published reviewer names

Frontiers does not fit the classic predatory definition. It operates real journals with real indexing and does not fabricate science. But its editorial model, its institutional controversies, and the actions taken by national evaluation systems mean that many researchers and committees treat Frontiers submissions more cautiously than society journals.

The right approach is journal-level assessment, not blanket acceptance or dismissal.

If you are deciding on a specific Frontiers target, the best next reads are:

• Is MDPI predatory?
• Is Hindawi predatory?

If you want a direct assessment of whether your paper should go to a Frontiers title, Manusights pre-submission review is the best next step.