2021
A game-changing
year in science

The coronavirus pandemic, our response, and our recovery will come to define this period in our history. But what will 2021 be remembered for? As well as the pandemic, the prevailing memory of last year will also be the fact that science, and more specifically open science, delivered solutions for one of the biggest challenges we have faced.

2021 demonstrated, above all else, that while COVID-19 remained a significant challenge, it was also a year of immense global collaboration and achievement. 

Today, two years after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, almost 11 billion vaccine doses for COVID-19 have been administered. More than 63% of the world’s population has received at least one dose of a vaccine and around 18 million vaccines are now administered daily. That is extraordinary progress against an unprecedented challenge. 

While we have not yet conquered the pandemic, scientists and the research community have risen to the challenge. Treatments and vaccines have been delivered at a speed faster than any other time in history - and that is something to be proud of and to be remembered. 

Open Science saved lives during the COVID-19 pandemic 

The underlying reason why we were able to develop vaccines and treatments for COVID-19 so fast is Open Science. 

When the pandemic hit and brought our economies to a halt it changed our lives overnight. Governments turned to scientists for treatments and solutions. Immediately it became obvious that if these solutions were to materialize fast, scientific results needed to be shared openly amongst scientists, the medical community, and other innovators. 

And this is what happened. Within weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic all coronavirus research was made open; a feat which achieved more than decades of hard work by so many Open Science advocates and research organizations. 

In January 2020, when most people were still not aware of COVID, Chinese scientists openly shared the genetic sequence of the coronavirus. This immediately triggered the race for vaccines at BioNTech, Moderna, and many other research organizations, both private and public. 

Two months later, in March 2020, when it was clear this was a global emergency, the US White House, together with a coalition of partner organizations, launched the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19). This collated all coronavirus-related research and mandated it must be open and free to access, even those articles published in subscription journals.  At the time, there were 30’000 coronavirus research articles. By the end of 2021, there were well over 400’000 – most open access. 

Only because all this science was shared openly, were researchers able to collaborate more effectively and deliver solutions. They delivered treatments and vaccines at a speed never seen before in human history. 

This policy decision of opening COVID-19 research was absolutely the right call. 

Now we need this decisiveness in other areas. Bigger challenges lie ahead and research in other areas critical to our future remains locked: climate change, diseases, sustainability, cyber security, and many others. What has been attained for COVID-19 has by far not yet been achieved for other diseases and global emergencies. 

Take some of these examples: Annually, cancer kills 10 million people; but of the 607,500 published papers between 2016 and 2021, only 28% were openly accessible. Cardiovascular disease is even worse: it kills 18 million people a year, but only 17% of research can be freely accessed.  

Figures for climate research show that of the approximately 160K papers published between 2015 and 2019, just 29% were accessible to researchers, industry, and members of the public. 

The climate emergency is the defining challenge of our generation. It determines the fate of all life on this planet. Just like for COVID-19, science does have the solutions for the climate emergency, but it’s only open science that will deliver these solutions fast enough to prevent the worst outcomes of global warming.  

Policymakers and funders as well as university administrators now must build on the incredible success of making coronavirus research openly accessible and act to make all science open. Some of the challenges we face will have irreversible consequences if we don’t act now. 

Here at Frontiers, we do our bid to make science open. 

Our mission is to make all of science open so that scientists can collaborate better and innovate faster to deliver the solutions for healthier lives on a healthy planet. Throughout 2021, thanks to the enormous efforts of everyone who is part of our wonderful community of editorial board members, staff, and those who support us, we reached several new and important milestones towards this mission. 

In the continued context of COVID, the Frontiers Forum opened its virtual doors in a series of webinars on science-led solutions to the grand challenges of our time with 24 incredible speakers, including former US Vice President, Al Gore. More than 21,000 of the world’s leading minds from 159 countries joined the discussions, which have been viewed online by more than six million people. 

2021 was also an exceptional year for Frontiers for Young Minds, our journal for young people aged eight to 15. In a first, five Nobel Laureates published a scientific article collection, connecting young minds with some of today’s most distinguished scientists. This outstanding journal has published 800 articles and includes English, Hebrew, and Arabic. Taken together, these articles have been viewed and downloaded more than 14 million times. 

Our Institutional Partnerships have also gone from strength to strength. In 2021, 64 new institutional partners joined Frontiers including the University of Oslo, the University of Oklahoma, Durham University, and the University of Colorado Boulder. Our number of Institutional Partners is now 555 and we have transparent National Open Access publishing deals in place in Austria, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden, the UK, and Qatar, and partnerships with six other consortia. 

Last year we also welcomed new growth throughout our operations. Frontiers now has more than 1,200 employees in 13 locations across Europe, North America, and Asia. We will continue to grow into 2022 and bring the best talent on board to help us achieve our mission of making science open to enable healthy lives on a healthy planet. 

Other key highlights from 2021

• We are the third most cited publisher with our average article citation count increasing from 3.9 in 2020 to 4.8 in 2021. 

• Last year, we published more than 85,000 quality research articles in our portfolio of journals. To date, we have now published 273,000+ research papers that are freely available and helping to inform vital research worldwide. 

•  There were more than 518 million article views and downloads of our published articles last year. In total, there have now been over 1.5 billion views and downloads of our papers, all of which are entirely free to access. 

•  Frontiers’ community grew to 169,000 editors and one million authors from leading institutions around the world last year. An additional 58,000 new editors joined our editorial boards. 

•  27 new journals were launched. Frontiers is now home to 139 community-run journals across 1,165 academic disciplines. 

Together, the scientific community achieved so much last year. Now we must build on that momentum. We must replicate this policy decisiveness and spirit of collaboration across other areas, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and the defining challenge of our time, climate change. Science is central to this, and through openly disseminating science we can solve these challenges at the speed we need to. At Frontiers, we remain committed to enabling this transition to Open Science in every way we can.   

A sincere thank you to our authors, editors, reviewers, and staff for everything you have contributed and for believing in open science. It is your contributions that will help enable a way forward for people and planet.  

I am proud to work alongside you and look forward to continuing to do so as we face the future together.  

Kamila Markram, PhD 

CEO and co-founder, Frontiers

January 2022