Frontiers forces AI onto academic journal editors

Frontiers is an academic publisher that keeps showing up on lists of predatory open-access publishers, whose business model certainly appears to be to accept any old rubbish and charge a swingeing fee to the author. Frontiers does try to keep a slight scientific gloss by recruiting proper...

Frontiers is an academic publisher that keeps showing up on lists of predatory open-access publishers, whose business model certainly appears to be to accept any old rubbish and charge a swingeing fee to the author. Frontiers does try to keep a slight scientific gloss by recruiting proper scientists as editors. Note that journal jobs aren’t paid positions. They’re volunteer jobs for the prestige and the sake of the science. Frontiers keeps all the money. Michael Okun resigned as associate editor of Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience in early June — because Frontiers’ AI-powered editing system kept forcing reviewers for papers onto him who weren’t even in the field. Worse yet: [Bluesky thread, archive] the AI began actively revoking the invitations I manually sent out to actual, qualified experts. I emailed and met with the editorial office to ask for the AI assistant to be turned off. I was told this is not possible. Okun spoke to neuroscience news site Transmitter: [Transmitter] It’s just inconceivable that a manual invitation to someone who is actually an expert in the field is revoked just a few hours after it is sent. The journal wants to publish as many submissions as possible and doesn’t care too much about quality. These are not bugs but intentional features, designed to essentially remove the human editors as much as possible. Frontiers chief executive editor Frederick Fenter told Transmitter he would be delighted to discuss Okun’s concerns. Just as if Okun hadn’t already spoken to Frontiers and been told the bot was staying. Transmitter spoke to several other Frontiers editors: Even after I decided to reject a manuscript, the system invited another reviewer without my permission. Frontiers has always been sort of terrible. It’s previously been happy to run blatant pseudoscience, such as HIV denialism or vaccine denialism. Hey, as long as the authors keep paying to play. [Retraction Watch; ScienceBlogs] This sort of thing is how Frontiers ended up as the number two entry on Wikipedia CiteWatch — the Wikipedia editor list of academic journals that are: [Wikipedia] potentially cargo cult, conspiracist, denialist, fake, junk, not even wrong, obsolete, predatory, pseudoscientific, quack, or otherwise unreliable.     Frontiers published the infamous “rat dck” picture in February 2024. It’s an AI-generated image of a rat with a cutaway diagram of four enormous testicles and a giant penis. The text labels are gibberish. At least the authors disclosed they’d made the picture with Midjourney. [Science Integrity Digest] Frontiers was eventually shamed into retracting the paper. But, somehow, this image had made it past the editor and two reviewers. The paper was published just two weeks after it was sent in. But I bet the payment cleared. Video — Podcast  

Source: Pivot to AI — Published July 2, 2026 at 20:15 UTC — Category: Business