FRONTIERS MEDIA SA

Their core work

Frontiers Media SA is one of the world's largest open-access scientific publishers, headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland, operating hundreds of peer-reviewed journals across medicine, neuroscience, life sciences, and beyond. In the H2020 context, they participated as an operational publisher-practitioner — bringing a live publishing platform, real reviewer networks, and large-scale bibliometric data to consortia studying how science is shared and evaluated. Their contribution is not theoretical: they run the systems that other projects theorize about, making them a rare source of ground-truth data on peer review behavior, article metrics, and dissemination reach. For any project touching open science infrastructure or scholarly communication reform, they represent direct access to a working, large-scale publishing operation.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

With only two projects both running between 2015 and 2018, there is no meaningful long-term evolution to track — this is a narrow window. What the sequence does reveal is a progression from technical infrastructure (OpenMinTeD focused on building mining pipelines over scientific text) toward reforming scholarly communication processes themselves (OpenUP addressed peer review quality, altmetrics, and dissemination frameworks). This suggests Frontiers moved from being a data provider in infrastructure projects to a co-designer of the open science norms and tools that shape their own industry.

Frontiers is moving from being a data source for research infrastructure projects toward shaping the standards and methods that govern how scientific publishing itself is evaluated — positioning them as both an industry practitioner and a policy actor in open science.

How they like to work

Frontiers Media participates exclusively as a consortium partner, never as a coordinator — consistent with a commercial publisher that joins academic-led reform initiatives rather than leading them. Their two projects both involved large, multi-national teams (averaging 12+ partners each), which reflects the cross-institutional nature of open science infrastructure work. They are sought after as practitioners who bring real operational data and platform access, not as research drivers, making them a grounding force in otherwise theoretical consortia.

From just two projects, Frontiers connected with 24 unique partners across 10 countries — a notably broad reach for a minimal H2020 footprint, indicating involvement in large pan-European consortia. Their network spans academic institutions, research infrastructure providers, and open science policy bodies across Western and Central Europe.

What sets them apart

Frontiers Media is one of the few commercial publishing entities active in H2020, which gives them a differentiated position: they do not study scholarly communication in the abstract — they run it, at scale, every day. A consortium that includes Frontiers gains access to live publishing infrastructure, real reviewer behavior data, and article-level metrics that no university or research institute can replicate. For projects on open science, bibliometrics, or dissemination, this is not just useful — it is often the difference between prototype and real-world validation.

Highlights from their portfolio

• OpenUP
  Directly targeted Frontiers' core business domain — peer review reform and impact measurement — making this project a rare case where the participant's operational platform was itself the subject of the research.
• OpenMinTeD
  As a major publisher, Frontiers' article corpus would have been a primary data asset for building the open text and data mining infrastructure this project delivered.