Is Your Paper Ready for Frontiers in Plant Science? Picking the Right Section Matters More Than You Think

Here's what catches first-time submitters off guard. You don't just pick a journal and upload your manuscript. You pick a section within the journal, and that section functions almost like its own mini-journal. Each section has a dedicated chief editor who runs editorial triage for that section, a pool of associate editors, and a roster of review editors.

This has several practical consequences.

Your section choice determines your editor. If you submit a drought stress paper to Plant Abiotic Stress, you'll get editors who specialize in abiotic stress responses. If you accidentally submit it to Plant Development and EvoDevo, you'll get editors who don't know your field as well and may desk-reject simply because they can't evaluate the contribution. I've seen authors lose weeks because they picked a section based on a vague title match rather than checking who the section editors actually are.

Different sections have different acceptance cultures. Frontiers doesn't publish section-level acceptance rates, but anyone who's submitted to multiple sections can tell you they aren't uniform. Some sections are more selective because their chief editors run a tighter ship. Others are more permissive. This isn't something you'll find in official Frontiers documentation, but it's real.

Section editors know their reviewers personally. Because each section maintains its own reviewer pool, the editors tend to have closer working relationships with their reviewers than you'd see at a journal with a centralized editorial office. This can work in your favor if your paper is solid: engaged reviewers who actually care about your subfield are more likely to give constructive feedback than a random reviewer pulled from a massive database.

Before submitting, look at recent papers in your target section. Do they match the type and scope of your work? If the last 20 papers in a section are all molecular biology and yours is a field ecology study, you're probably in the wrong place.

Frontiers uses what it calls "collaborative review," and it's genuinely different from what you'll experience at most journals. Here's how it works in practice.

After your paper passes editorial triage, it goes to at least two review editors. They read the manuscript and provide initial reports, just like at any other journal. But here's the difference: instead of the reports going back through the handling editor as an intermediary, Frontiers opens a direct discussion forum between the authors and reviewers. You can respond to reviewer comments in real time, ask for clarification, and negotiate revisions interactively.

The idea is that this back-and-forth produces better papers than the traditional model, where you get a set of reviewer comments, revise in isolation for two months, resubmit, and hope you've addressed everything. In theory, it's a good concept. In practice, it has quirks you should know about.

Reviewers sometimes disengage during the interactive phase. The model works beautifully when everyone participates. But if a reviewer goes silent during the discussion, you're stuck waiting. The associate editor can intervene, but it adds time.

The "no rejection after review" philosophy. Frontiers has been criticized for a policy where, once a paper enters the interactive review phase, outright rejection becomes rare. The expectation is that the collaborative process will fix problems rather than eliminate papers. Critics argue this lowers standards. Supporters argue it just shifts the quality filter earlier, into the editorial triage stage. Whatever your view, it's worth knowing: if your paper gets past the desk and into review, your odds of eventual acceptance are high.

Review quality varies by section. Some sections attract deeply engaged reviewers who treat the interactive forum as a genuine intellectual exchange. Others attract reviewers who write two paragraphs and disappear. You can't control this, but choosing a well-run section with active editors improves your chances of getting useful feedback.

Frontiers in Plant Science isn't trying to be the most prestigious plant biology journal. It's trying to be the most accessible one. That's not a criticism. There's real value in a well-indexed, fully open-access journal that publishes sound science across the full breadth of plant biology.

You've got a solid, complete study that isn't flashy enough for the top-tier journals. Your methods are rigorous, your data is clean, and your conclusions are supported. But the result isn't going to make the cover of Plant Cell. Frontiers is built for exactly this kind of paper.

You need open access and your funder requires it. If your grant mandates immediate open access under a CC-BY license, Frontiers delivers that by default. You don't have to pay an extra OA surcharge on top of a subscription journal's existing costs.

You're in applied plant science or crop science. Frontiers has strong sections for crop biology, bioenergy, and plant breeding. Applied work sometimes struggles at journals like New Phytologist or Plant Cell, which tend to prefer fundamental research. Frontiers doesn't have that bias.

You're an early-career researcher building a publication record. The ~50-55% acceptance rate and relatively fast turnaround make Frontiers a practical choice when you need publications and can't afford to spend six months in review at a journal that might reject you anyway.

Even with a 50-55% acceptance rate, roughly half of submissions don't make it. Here's what goes wrong.

Wrong section selection. This is the single most preventable mistake. If your paper lands on the desk of a section chief editor who doesn't think it fits their section, you'll get a transfer offer or a rejection before anyone reads the science. Spend ten minutes looking at what each section actually publishes. It's not hard, but most authors skip it.

Descriptive work without a clear question. "We sequenced the genome of species X" or "We measured trait Y in 50 accessions" isn't enough on its own. Frontiers reviewers want to see a biological question driving the work. What did you learn from the genome that wasn't known before? What does the trait variation tell us about adaptation? A paper that reads like a data report without interpretation will get pushed back.

Overloaded manuscripts. Some authors try to pack three papers' worth of data into one submission, thinking that more data means a stronger paper. It doesn't. If your manuscript has 12 figures and 8 supplementary tables, ask yourself whether it wouldn't work better as two focused papers. Reviewers get overwhelmed by sprawling manuscripts, and the interactive review phase becomes unwieldy when there are too many threads to discuss.

Statistical issues in -omics papers. Frontiers publishes a lot of transcriptomics, metabolomics, and proteomics work. Reviewers in these sections are increasingly strict about multiple testing correction, appropriate statistical models, and validation of bioinformatic findings. If you're reporting 500 differentially expressed genes, you'd better have your FDR correction in order and some independent validation of the top hits.

Missing data availability. Frontiers requires raw data to be deposited in public repositories. Sequence data goes in NCBI (GEO, SRA). Metabolomics data goes in MetaboLights or the Metabolomics Workbench. If you haven't deposited your data before submission, you'll get stuck during the editorial check.

At $2,950, Frontiers in Plant Science isn't cheap. It's more expensive than BMC Plant Biology ($2,390) and more expensive than paying the OA option at many hybrid journals when institutional Read and Publish agreements are factored in.

That said, the APC includes everything. There aren't hidden charges for color figures, supplementary files, or extra pages. And Frontiers offers fee waivers for authors in low-income countries and institutional agreements that can reduce or eliminate the cost. Check with your library before assuming you'll pay full price out of pocket.

Is $2,950 good value? That depends on what you're comparing it to. If the alternative is a subscription journal where your paper sits behind a paywall and only gets read by people at institutions that can afford the subscription, then yes, the OA visibility is worth something. If the alternative is BMC Plant Biology at $2,390 for a similar editorial experience, then you're paying a $560 premium mostly for a slightly higher impact factor. You'll have to decide whether that's worth it for your situation.