Frontiers in Computational Physics, see here

Chief editor: Christian Klingenberg

What is the concept of this journal?

The notion of passing the copyright of one’s article to an online journal is questionable. Authors who publish with Frontiers retain the copyright to their work. This addresses one of the most pressing problems in the current shift from print- to online-publishing: what happens to the scientific literature as a whole if a publisher goes out of business? Traditional publishers make papers only available as long as a library subscribes. There is no physical medium to archive the scientific literature without violating current copyright legislation - unless you publish open access, e.g. with Frontiers.


All Frontiers articles are Open Access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source are credited.


Frontiers is an open-access publisher, and there are fees associated with articles accepted for publication. The burden of paying for this way of publishing is moved to the authors, and access to their articles via libraries is made obsolete. This is admittedly a paradigm shift from the usual publishing model, but authors clearly benefit from the unrestricted global visibility of their publications, which includes retaining the copyright on their own work. These fees effectively replace page charges and color figure charges in traditional journals, and are used instead to support the open access philosophy.


The refereeing process here is distinct from having anonymous referees judge the quality of a submitted article. At Frontiers it is not only the opinion of 2-3 reviewers, however qualified, that determines the importance of a research work, but the entire academic community.


The review process is divided into several steps:

- the paper first goes through the review process, and referees focus on providing constructive reports aiming to help authors improve the quality of their paper. Referees focus on objective issues only, and do not judge the significance or interest of the paper; this is done post publication by the scientific community.

- Throughout the review process the reviewers remain anonymous, but upon acceptance the names of those who have endorsed publication are disclosed. This provides transparency and accountability and also acknowledges the hard work of referees on the paper.

- When a paper is accepted for publication the author then pays the publishing fee.

- Now the importance and significance of the article is judged by the readership of the article using an "article level impact" system. The individual impact of a paper is measured using downloads, abstract hits, citations, country and website of origin. The authors or those articles deemed excellent by the community of scholars are then invited to write a review article of this work to appeal to a wider audience. For details see here http://www.frontiersin.org/about/reviewsystem

grand challenges in computational physics, read the article here

Strategic allience with NATURE Publishing group read the article here

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