A year in review
2020 Progress Report
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.
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.
Dr. Kamila Markram
CEO and co-founder, Frontiers
Key figures
3rd most-cited publisher
Frontiers is an award-winning open science platform and leading open access scholarly publisher.
In 2020, we were the 3rd most-cited publisher, increasing average citations from 3.9 in 2019 to 4.8 in 2020 for every article published with us.
185,000 published articles
We empower scientists with innovative Open Science solutions that radically improve how science is published, evaluated and disseminated to researchers, innovators and the public.
In 2020, we published over 48,000 open access articles, a 46% increase on the year before. To date, we have published a total of 185,000 articles across 103 journals and spanning 866 academic disciplines.
1 billion article views and downloads
Frontiers articles have been viewed and downloaded more than one billion times from all over the world.
Supporting the scientific response to Covid-19
Coronavirus Knowledge Hub
To support the fight against Covid-19, we launched the Coronavirus Knowledge Hub, bringing research communities together and offering trusted information and analysis on the pandemic. This includes the latest research articles, expert interviews, and funding resources.
Covid-19 Academic Survey
To give scientists a voice, we ran an academic survey with our authors, editors, and reviewers in May and June 2020. More than 25,000 researchers from 152 countries participated, sharing insights into how the pandemic is impacting their work and the wider implications for science.
27 journal launches: our commitment to the SDGs
We launched 27 new open access journals in 2020, including Frontiers in Conservation Science and Frontiers in Global Women’s Health – part of our continued commitment to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
The next generation of peer review
In an industry first, we introduced our artificial intelligence review assistant (AIRA), to our editors, reviewers, and authors.
AIRA has the potential to revolutionize how manuscripts are evaluated, and was covered by the New York Times in their November 2020 editorial Do You Have a Conflict of Interest? This Robotic Assistant May Find It First.