re: The previous right hand man to JBE, Dr. Billioux says he is still not comfortable dining

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In April 2013, Frontiers in Psychology retracted a controversial article linking climate change denialism and "conspiracist ideation";[34] the retraction was itself also controversial and led to the resignations of at least three editors.[35]


In late September 2014, Frontiers in Public Health published a controversial article that supported HIV denialism; three days later the publisher issued a statement of concern and announced an investigation into the review process of the article.[36] It was eventually decided that the article would not be retracted but instead was reclassified as an opinion piece.[37] It has since been retracted.[38] Collaboration between the Nature Publishing Group and Frontiers ended when the two groups decided in November 2014 "to make a clean separation and never to mention again that [Nature Publishing Group] has some kind of involvement in Frontiers."[39]

In May 2015, Frontiers Media removed the entire editorial boards of Frontiers in Medicine and Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine after editors complained that Frontiers Media staff were "interfering with editorial decisions and violating core principles of medical publishing".[39]

In October 2015, Frontiers was added to Jeffrey Beall's list of "Potential, possible, or probable" predatory open-access publishers.[6][40][12] The inclusion was met with backlash amongst some researchers.[6] In July 2016 Beall recommended that academics not publish their work in Frontiers journals, stating "the fringe science published in Frontiers journals stigmatizes the honest research submitted and published there",[41] and in October of that year Beall reported that reviewers have called the review process "merely for show".[42]

In October 2015, the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) said that "there have been vigorous discussions about, and some editors are uncomfortable with, the editorial processes at Frontiers" but that "the processes are declared clearly on the publisher's site and we do not believe there is any attempt to deceive either editors or authors about these processes".[9] Frontiers is a COPE member and one of its employees sits on COPE's council.[9]

In September 2016, Frontiers demanded that the university where Beall worked force him to retract his claims.[43][44] Pressure by Frontiers was reported to be a large factor in the controversial shutdown of Beall's List.[45]

In November 2016, a paper linking vaccines to autism was retracted from a Frontiers journal.[46]
In 2017, further editors were removed, allegedly for their rejection rate being high.[47] In December 2017 Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky wrote in the magazine Nautilus that the acceptance rate of manuscripts in Frontiers journals was reported to be near 90%.[48]

According to Allison and James Kaufman in the 2018 book Pseudoscience: The Conspiracy Against Science, "Frontiers has used an in-house journals management software that does not give reviewers the option to recommend the rejection of manuscripts" and that the "system is setup to make it almost impossible to reject papers".[49]

In 2021, a provisionally accepted controversial paper in Frontiers in Pharmacology on COVID-19 and the use of the antiparasitic drug Ivermectin was ultimately rejected by the editors as it contained "unsubstantiated claims and violated the journal’s editorial policies". This has drawn anger among the authors of the paper calling the move "censorship". [50] Retraction Watch notes that this is not the first time Frontiers already provisionally accepted and then rejected a controversial paper. [51]

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