Frontiers Media SA is a publisher of peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journals[2] currently active in science, technology, and medicine.

In February 2012, the Frontiers Research Network was launched,[7] a social networking platform for researchers, intended to disseminate the open access articles published in the Frontiers journals, and to provide related conferences, blogs, news, video lectures and job postings.

[38] According to researchers referenced in a 2015 blog post quoted by 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 the "system is setup to make it almost impossible to reject papers".

[citation needed] In December 2017, Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky of Retraction Watch wrote in the magazine Nautilus that the acceptance rate of manuscripts in Frontiers journals was reported to be near 90%.

[42] In January 2023, Zhejiang Gongshang University (浙江工商大学) in Hangzhou, China, announced it would no longer include articles published in Hindawi, MDPI, and Frontiers journals when evaluating researcher performance.

[46] In October 2015, Frontiers was added to Beall's List of "Potential, possible, or probable" predatory open-access publishers.

[47] Daniël Lakens, researcher at the Eindhoven University of Technology, said "articles people have published in Frontiers are no longer judged based on their own quality, but are now seen as less valuable because Frontiers is on Beall's list" and that "[h]aving a single influential individual cast doubt on such a huge journal feels very unfair".

[60] In November 2016, a paper in Frontiers in Public Health linking vaccines to autism was provisionally-accepted, then retracted.

[61] 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".

[63] A study published in Frontiers in Virology in February 2022 said that Moderna had patented a 19 nucleotide genetic sequence uniquely matching a part of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein three years prior to the pandemic, arguing it was evidence that the virus was manufactured as part of a lab leak conspiracy.

[64][65] The study has been widely derided for its misunderstanding of statistical likelihood, particularly as the 19 nucleotide sequence is not unique to SARS-CoV-2, and is also found in organisms like bacteria and birds.

[65][66] Craig Wilen, an immunobiology professor of the Yale School of Medicine, likened the study to "complete garbage" and a "conspiracy theory" rather than legitimate research.

[64][67] A now-retracted 2024 paper published in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology[68] was criticized for having figures AI generated with Midjourney, described as featuring "garbled text and a wildly incorrect diagram of a rat penis".