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Publisher Frontiers cuts 70 jobs in Switzerland and 600 worldwide

Publisher Frontiers Slashes 600 Jobs Amidst Shrinking Scientific Market
(Symbol image) The reason for the job cuts is the shrinking market for scientific publications and a significant increase in fraudulent articles. Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved

The scientific publisher Frontiers, founded in 2007 at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), has to cut 600 jobs in 23 countries. Around 70 jobs are affected in Switzerland.

A consultation process with staff is currently underway, a Frontiers spokeswoman told the Keystone-SDA news agency on Wednesday. She confirmed a report in the daily newspaper 24 Heures. The exact number of redundancies remain to be announced.

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The reason for the job cuts is the shrinking market for scientific publications and a significant increase in fraudulent articles. This prompted Frontiers to develop a tool using artificial intelligence, and as a result more articles had to be rejected.

The publisher is now forced to reorganise itself due to falling revenues, it added. Frontiers, based in Lausanne, has been committed to free access to scientific publications since it was founded. Its portfolio consists of over 200 open access scientific journals and employs around 2,000 people.

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According to its own information, the publishing house is the sixth largest academic publisher and the third most frequently cited. Its articles have been cited around 7.2 million times and downloaded 2.5 billion times to date.

  

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Correction: a previous version of this article stated that the publishing house publishes 72 scientific journals and employs around 2,000 people.

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