Born Digital: building the ultimate open-access publisher | Frontiers Blog

"The digital disruption for analog film started in 1975 with the invention of the digital camera by Steven Sasson and ended with the bankruptcy of Kodak in 2012 (40 years later). The digital disruption in publishing started in the late 1990s with the first online archiving of articles, but it is still far from complete (~30 years into the transition). However, as over 30% of peer-reviewed papers are now published in some form of open-access1, the industry has technically crossed the tipping point for disruption. This is the point where more than just the innovators and early adopters begin using a product or service ... Frontiers was born digital 8 years ago, and with only a tiny fraction of the resources of a traditional publisher, has managed to release a series of innovative digital services that are impacting the way scholarly publishing is evolving. It was the first publisher to build a Digital or Virtual Editorial Office to allow complete operational independence for over 60,000 editors around the world. Frontiers developed a real-time Interactive Review Forum to implement its Collaborative Review philosophy, which is geared towards fair, constructive and virtually instantaneous interactions between authors, reviewers and editors. The publisher’s entire IT ecosystem was built in-house and from scratch, rather than using the  off-the-shelf products many other publishers use. Frontiers also pioneered Article Level Metrics in 2008 to allow instantaneous tracking of readership of an article. This feature has since been adopted by many other publishers. And with over 2/3rds of the approximately 200 staff Frontiers employs, as IT engineers, Frontiers’ focus is constantly on providing better and more efficient services for scientists at more competitive costs ..."