The year of open science

Covid-19 is a challenge like nothing the scientific research community has ever faced. Society turned to scientists for answers and they excelled at delivering solutions, racing to provide insights into a global health emergency and developing treatments and vaccines at a speed never seen before in human history.

While 2020 will be remembered for the shockwave the Covid-19 pandemic sent across the globe, it is also the year in which the power of science – particularly the power of open science – was demonstrated.

Science saves lives and livelihoods. And open science saves faster.

With a global death toll of 2.8 million people and economic losses in the trillions of dollars, lives and livelihoods depended on treatments and vaccines and it became obvious how essential it is to share scientific results openly, whether it is data or research articles. 

The genetic code of the SARS-COV-2 virus was shared with the entire scientific community in January 2020, enabling scientists in academia and industry to instantly start vaccine developments. In 2020, we also saw the balance finally tip to open access: over 180,000 Covid-related articles were peer reviewed and published – most of them open access, even those in subscription journals. What could not be accomplished over decades, was rightfully done for Covid-19 research within a matter of months.

By openly sharing the data and research, scientists were able to collaborate more effectively and deliver treatments and vaccines in less than a year – an astonishing speed which has never been achieved before.  

This is the power of science – made open.

Responding to a pandemic 

The 117,000 editorial board members and 750 employees at Frontiers also mobilized to work together and provide concrete support and solutions during the pandemic. 

Despite the massive disruption caused by the outbreak, researchers managed to adapt and continue working as revealed in the Frontiers survey of our communities, The Academic Response to COVID-19, conducted with more than 25,000 researchers from 152 countries.

This was also apparent in our Covid-19 call to action, which received an overwhelming response and within a matter of weeks we launched our Coronavirus Knowledge Hub, a centralized source of trusted information and analysis on the pandemic. This included expert commentaries on the pandemic, Covid-19 funding and data resources, as well as the latest research articles and 152 article collections covering many aspects of the outbreak, from prevention, treatment and vaccine development to psychological and economic impacts.

To deal with over 10,000 submissions to date, 159 researchers volunteered to join our rapid review task force. They were, and continue to be, on stand-by for any Covid-related submissions to ensure a fast-tracked and rigorous peer review. 

This has resulted in over 3,500 published Covid-19 articles. These have been viewed and downloaded more than 20 million times from research and innovation hubs around the world. 

In support of the scientific response, we made sure these articles were not only free to read and download, but also free to publish – Frontiers provided more than $4 million in waivers for Covid-19 publications. 

Being pulled apart brought us closer together 

The health and safety of our employees has always been our top priority and on March 16, 2020 we closed our offices in Lausanne, London, Madrid, Seattle, Trivandrum and Beijing. Since then, most of our employees have been working from home.

As a technology company we are accustomed to working online and we were able to seamlessly transition to working from home. But the challenges posed by a sudden global lockdown was new and uncharted territory also for us. From having to support Covid-19 cases to experiencing uncertainty and anxiety, lack of testing capacity, caring for children and dealing with isolation, we had to pull together and support each other through this new reality. We established a Covid support team to provide advice and assistance for employees struggling to cope with the pandemic. This included flexible working arrangements for parents, various wellbeing initiatives, and resources to help us stay connected.

We organized, at first weekly and then later bi-monthly, “town hall” meetings with our staff to share information and support. After an overwhelmingly positive response, we extended this initiative to our editorial boards. In 2020, we organized two virtual Editors’ Summits attended by almost 15,000 editors on our boards, to share experiences, unite against the coronavirus and highlight progress.

We didn’t anticipate the impact of reaching and connecting with even more people online, so are pleased to announce that the Frontiers Forum Speaker Series is going online too. 2021 speakers include David Christian, founder of the Big History Project, and Esther Duflo, Economics Nobel Prize laureate.

We made tremendous progress

Not only did these initiatives lead to a stronger sense of community, we also made significant progress.

Key milestones reached in 2020 include:

• Frontiers is the 3rd most-cited publisher with the average article citation count increasing from 3.9 in 2019 to 4.8 in 2020. 

• In 2020, article views and downloads increased to 380 million, a 62% increase over the previous year, totaling well over one billion. 

• The Frontiers scholarly community grew to more than 117,000 editors and 671,000 authors from leading institutions around the world. An additional 16,000 new editors joined our editorial boards in 2020. 

• 27 new journals were launched in 2020. Most specifically aligned with the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, including Frontiers in Conservation Science and Frontiers in Global Women’s Health. Frontiers now hosts 103 journals across 866 academic disciplines.  

• 77 new institutional members joined in the last year, including the University of Oxford, CERN, and Bibliosan, bringing the total number to 240. There are now transparent national open access publishing agreements for universities in Austria, Sweden, Qatar, the UK, and Norway. 

• Frontiers for Young Minds, our journal for kids and teens, now has 581 articles and 7.6 million views and downloads. Articles are available in English and Hebrew, and Arabic versions are planned to launch soon. 

• In an industry first, Frontiers’ artificial intelligence review assistant (AIRA) was deployed to assist our editors, reviewers, as well as authors, in the peer review process. AIRA currently conducts more than 20 quality checks with the goal to continuously increase integrity and quality in manuscripts and the peer review process. 

A better world through open science 

The mission under which all of us at Frontiers unite is to make science open to accelerate the solutions we need to live healthy lives on a healthy planet.

Making science open enabled scientists to deliver treatments and vaccines for Covid-19.  

Making science open will better prepare us for future pandemics.  

Making science open will also enable us to tackle other public health issues, including respiratory diseases (8 million annual deaths), cancer (10 million annual deaths) and cardiovascular diseases (18 million annual deaths).  Only 20-30% of articles in these research areas are open access. We could be saving many more lives and preventing further economic losses by embracing open science as our default modus operandus. 

Making science open will enable us to address the greatest challenge of our generation – climate change. The challenge of getting to zero greenhouse gas emissions needs to be solved within our lifetime, so a particularly daunting task. Science is key, but only with open science do we stand a chance to win this race.   

This is the journey we have been on since 2007 and a challenge we are committed to tackling until all science is open science.

A heartfelt thank you to our authors, editors, reviewers and staff for taking this journey with us, for your invaluable contributions, and for your ongoing commitment to open science.  

I am truly proud to be a part of this community and to work alongside people who are making a difference and contributing to healthy lives on a healthy planet.

Kamila Markram
April 2021