Frontiers in Physiology

About Frontiers in Physiology

About Frontiers in Physiology

Frontiers in Physiology is a peer-reviewed, open access journal published by Frontiers Media S.A. in Switzerland, identified by the electronic ISSN 1664-042X, which is the only ISSN recorded for the journal in the stored JournalsWorld record, in the OpenAlex source record resolved from that ISSN, and in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listing consulted for this profile. The journal's own About page defines its territory in one sentence: it explores the physiology of living systems across all levels, from the molecular and subcellular to the intact organism and its interaction with the environment. That breadth is the centre of the journal's identity. It is not a journal for a single organ system, a single species or a single technique. It is a whole-field physiology journal, organised into specialty sections, each with its own editors and reviewers, under a Field Chief Editor for the journal as a whole.

The stored JournalsWorld record dates the journal's publication coverage from 2010, which matches the journal's known launch period as one of the early Frontiers titles. In the years since that launch it has grown into one of the larger physiology titles in open access publishing. The OpenAlex source record resolved from ISSN 1664-042X at the time of checking for this profile (source S52732750) recorded 20,358 works and 567,926 citations for the journal. Readers should treat those OpenAlex totals as a snapshot at checking time rather than as a permanent figure, because a journal publishing at this volume adds works every week, and because OpenAlex source records are known to merge and split over time, so totals can move between checks.

This profile sets out what could be verified about the journal from sources actually consulted for it: the stored JournalsWorld record, the journal's own About and publishing-fees pages on frontiersin.org, its DOAJ listing obtained through the DOAJ search API, and the OpenAlex source record resolved directly from its ISSN. Where a fact could not be verified from those sources, the profile says so plainly, in the wording used throughout this directory, rather than completing the picture with a plausible guess.

Journal Profile at a Glance

• Full title: Frontiers in Physiology
• Short name / abbreviation: Front. Physiol.; abbreviation fphys, as given on the journal's About page
• Electronic ISSN: 1664-042X
• ISSN-L: 1664-042X, in the OpenAlex source record
• Publisher: Frontiers Media S.A., Switzerland (country CH in the DOAJ and OpenAlex records)
• Field Chief Editor: Prof John D Imig, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, USA, as named on the journal's About page at the time of checking
• Launch / coverage: from 2010, in the stored JournalsWorld record
• Access model: fully open access; articles published under the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY), with authors retaining copyright, as recorded in the DOAJ listing and the journal's open access statement
• Peer review: single anonymised review, as described on the journal's About page; the DOAJ listing likewise records an anonymised review process
• Journal Impact Factor: 4.3 and CiteScore 8, as presented in the Facts panel of the journal's own About page at the time of checking
• OpenAlex source: S52732750 — 20,358 works, 567,926 citations, h-index 234, i10-index 12,223 and a two-year mean citedness of about 4.06 at the time of checking
• Stored h-index: 195 in the JournalsWorld record; h-index values differ between databases because each database counts a different citation universe, so the two figures are not in conflict

History and Identity

Frontiers in Physiology belongs to the first generation of the Frontiers journal family, the open access publishing programme built in Lausanne, Switzerland, around the idea that a journal should be organised as a community of specialty sections rather than as a single editorial office handling every topic. Physiology was a natural early subject for that model. It is a discipline that runs from molecules to whole organisms, so a single traditional editorial board struggles to cover it, while a federation of sections — cardiac, renal, respiratory, exercise, environmental and many more — can each be led by specialists in that area. The journal's About page still reflects that founding design: manuscripts are submitted directly to a specialty section, and they are peer-reviewed by the Associate Editors and reviewers of that section.

The journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), as stated on its own pages, and it operates under the Frontiers open access statement: all research publications are free to read online, published under CC BY, and authors retain copyright in their work. The DOAJ listing consulted for this profile, added to that directory in 2011, records the same licence terms and confirms the journal's place in the open access directory for its electronic ISSN. The journal's own indexing list, reproduced in the metrics section below, shows the reach it has built since 2010 across the major biomedical databases.

One part of the journal's identity deserves emphasis because authors frequently misunderstand it. Although the word physiology covers a great deal of medicine, the journal's About page draws an explicit boundary: manuscripts that focus solely on clinical or medical research, including cancer studies, traditional medicine and patient prognosis, are not suitable for this journal, and purely statistical or computational work without a clear physiological context is likewise out of scope. Cancer-related research is welcome only where it addresses the physiology and pathophysiology of the disease, from cellular mechanisms to altered organ physiology. Work that belongs to clinical medicine is redirected by the editors towards sister titles such as Frontiers in Medicine or Frontiers in Oncology. A physiological mechanism must be at the heart of the paper.

Scope and Subject Coverage

The journal's stated mission is to understand how body components work together to maintain a healthy state, and to communicate that knowledge to researchers and the public. Its listed topics of interest, taken from the About page, include avian, aquatic and invertebrate physiology; biophysics, medical physics and imaging; cancer-related physiology and pathophysiology; cardiac electrophysiology; cell, membrane, metabolic, mitochondrial and redox physiology; chronobiology; computational physiology and medicine; craniofacial, tooth, skin, skeletal and striated muscle physiology; developmental physiology; environmental, aviation and space physiology; exercise physiology; gastrointestinal physiology; integrative, clinical and translational physiology; neurophysiology and autonomic neuroscience; physio-logging; reproductive and mating physiology; and respiratory, vascular, renal and red blood cell physiology. The journal particularly welcomes studies that support the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, notably SDG 3, good health and well-being.

That scope is delivered through more than thirty specialty sections, which at the time of checking included Aquatic Physiology, Autonomic Neuroscience, Avian Physiology, Biophysics, Cardiac Electrophysiology, Cell Physiology, Chronobiology, Clinical and Translational Physiology, Computational Physiology and Medicine, Craniofacial Biology and Dental Research, Developmental Physiology, Environmental, Aviation and Space Physiology, Exercise Physiology, Gastrointestinal Sciences, Integrative Physiology, Invertebrate Physiology, Lipid and Fatty Acid Research, Medical Physics and Imaging, Membrane Physiology and Membrane Biophysics, Metabolic Physiology, Mitochondrial Research, Physio-logging, Red Blood Cell Physiology, Redox Physiology, Renal Physiology and Pathophysiology, Reproductive and Mating Physiology, Respiratory Physiology and Pathophysiology, Skeletal Physiology, Skin Physiology, Striated Muscle Physiology and Vascular Physiology. The practical consequence for authors is that the section, not the journal title alone, decides fit: a paper is judged by the editors of the section it is sent to, against that section's own scope statement.

To give a feel for how the sections differ, the journal's Exercise Physiology section, whose scope statement was consulted for this profile, covers acute and chronic physiological adjustments to exercise in humans and animal models, the biomechanics of exercise, exercise and motor control, new methodologies in exercise research, adaptations to exercise in challenging environments such as microgravity, heat, cold, hypoxia and sleep deprivation, and the physiological determinants of performance and its limits — while declining descriptive sports studies that do not address physiological mechanisms, and imaging or gene-expression studies without a strong foundation in adaptation to exercise. The Clinical and Translational Physiology section, also consulted, welcomes the article types listed below and directs submissions at the boundary between physiological mechanism and clinical application. Reading the section statement before submitting is the single most effective step an author can take with this journal.

The OpenAlex topic profile of the journal, resolved from its ISSN, is consistent with this breadth: its leading topics at the time of checking were cardiovascular and exercise physiology, sports performance and training, cardiac electrophysiology and arrhythmias, heart rate variability and autonomic control, muscle physiology and disorders, and exercise and physiological responses. Those topics describe where the journal's published output has concentrated; they are not a limit on what it will consider.

Editorial Leadership and Peer Review

The journal is led by a Field Chief Editor, named on the About page as Prof John D Imig of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, USA. Below that level, each specialty section has its own Chief Editor, Associate Editors and community reviewers, and editorial decision power is deliberately distributed: the journal states that Associate Editors oversee peer review and take the final acceptance decision on manuscripts. Editor and reviewer names and affiliations are published on published articles.

Frontiers describes its review model in detail on the About page, and the profile summarises it here because it differs from the conventional model authors may expect. It is a single anonymised model: reviewers' identities are not shown to the author, authors' identities are visible to the reviewer, and both are visible to the decision-making editor. Review proceeds in stages — an initial quality check by the Associate Editor, independent review by the invited reviewers using a standardised questionnaire, and then an interactive stage in which authors and reviewers discuss the manuscript directly in a review forum until consensus is reached or the reviewers recommend rejection. Reviewers may recommend rejection at that stage if their requests to correct objective errors are not met. Submitting authors may suggest a preferred Associate Editor, although there is no guarantee that preference will be followed. The DOAJ listing records the journal's review process as anonymised, which matches this description in substance.

Metrics, Indexing and Standing

The journal's own Facts panel, consulted at the time of checking, presents an Impact Factor of 4.3 and a CiteScore of 8. The stored JournalsWorld record classifies the journal as Q2 and records an h-index of 195. The OpenAlex source record resolved from the ISSN recorded, at the same checking time, 20,358 works, 567,926 citations, an h-index of 234, an i10-index of 12,223 and a two-year mean citedness of about 4.06. These figures come from different databases with different coverage and counting rules, and they change continuously; they should be read as evidence of scale and sustained citation, not as interchangeable measurements of the same quantity. Authors who need a specific metric for a promotion or funding rule should take it from the database that the rule names, at the date the rule requires.

The journal's own About page lists its indexing as follows: Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE), CNPIEC, CNKI Scholar, COPE, CLOCKSS, Crossref, Dimensions, Embase, the Chinese Academy of Sciences GoOA service, OpenAIRE, ResearchGate, EBSCO, DOAJ, Scopus, PubMed, PubMed Central (PMC), Web of Science Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), Food Science and Technology Abstracts (FSTA), ZB MED and ProQuest. In practical terms that list covers the three services physiologists check first — Scopus, SCIE and PubMed Central — together with the DOAJ listing that confirms its open access status. Whether a particular article appears in a particular service depends on that service's own processing, so readers verifying the indexing of a specific paper should search the service itself.

Fees, Licensing and Open Access

Frontiers in Physiology is a gold open access journal funded by article publishing charges (APCs) paid on accepted articles. The journal's own publishing-fees pages, consulted for this profile, list the charges for this journal as CHF 3,150 for A-type articles, CHF 2,500 for B-type articles and no charge for C-type articles. A-type articles include Original Research, Systematic Review, Review, Hypothesis and Theory, Technology and Code and, in some sections, Methods. B-type articles include Mini Review, Perspective, Case Report, Brief Research Report, General Commentary, Opinion, Policy Brief, Data Report and Conceptual Analysis, with the exact assignment varying slightly by section. C-type articles are Correction and Editorial. The DOAJ listing likewise records that the journal has an APC, with a maximum recorded figure of CHF 3,150, which matches the A-type charge above. Fee schedules change, so authors should confirm the current amount for their section and article type on the journal's own fees pages before submitting.

Two mitigations are recorded on the journal's own pages. First, authors whose institution participates in the Frontiers institutional partnerships programme may receive full or partial support for the APC. Second, Frontiers operates a fee support programme, and authors in countries classified by the World Bank as low income or lower-middle income may be eligible for discounts. Articles are published under CC BY, authors retain copyright, and the work may be deposited in any repository and freely shared and adapted with appropriate credit — terms that make the journal compliant with the open access mandates of funders such as the Wellcome Trust, the US National Institutes of Health and the Australian Research Council, as the journal itself notes.

How to Submit and What the Journal Publishes

Manuscripts must be submitted directly to one of the specialty sections listed above, through the Frontiers submission system, and are handled by that section's editors. The article types the sections welcome include Brief Research Report, Case Report, Clinical Trial, Community Case Study, Conceptual Analysis, Correction, Data Report, Editorial, FAIR² Data, General Commentary, Hypothesis and Theory, Methods, Mini Review, Opinion, Original Research, Perspective, Policy Brief, Policy and Practice Reviews, Retraction, Review, Study Protocol, Systematic Review and Technology and Code — again, the exact menu varies by section, and the section page is the controlling document. Manuscripts primarily comprising computational studies of public data must include appropriate validation, under the Frontiers standards for research methodology; manuscripts not adhering to those standards will not be considered. That validation rule is stated on the journal's own pages and is one of the most common avoidable causes of rejection for data-driven submissions.

A realistic submission checklist for this journal therefore runs as follows. First, name the physiological mechanism your paper explains, in one sentence; if you cannot, the paper probably belongs in a clinical sister title. Second, choose the specialty section whose scope statement matches that mechanism, and read its statement in full, including its exclusions. Third, match your manuscript to an article type that section actually offers, and check which fee band that type falls into. Fourth, if the work is computational or based on public data, build the validation the journal requires into the study design rather than adding it afterwards. Fifth, confirm funding for the APC, an institutional partnership discount, or fee support eligibility before submission, not after acceptance.

Who Should Read and Cite This Journal

For readers, the journal functions as a broad current-awareness source for physiology as a whole and as a deep source within each section's territory. Its open access terms mean that any reader — researcher, clinician, student or member of the public — can read the full text without a subscription, and its presence in PubMed Central makes its clinical-adjacent content discoverable alongside the mainstream biomedical literature. For citing authors, its reviews and methods papers in areas such as exercise physiology, autonomic control and redox biology are the kind of mid-field reference that methods sections routinely rely on. The section structure also makes it a useful scouting tool: following one section's output is an efficient way to track a subfield without monitoring dozens of smaller titles.

Similar and Related Journals

Authors weighing Frontiers in Physiology against neighbouring titles usually consider the following. The Journal of Physiology and Physiological Reviews represent the long-established society end of the field, with the latter devoted to major invited reviews. The American Journal of Physiology family splits physiology by organ system into separate titles, the opposite organisational choice to this journal's single title with sections. Within the same publisher's portfolio, Frontiers in Medicine is the destination for work whose centre of gravity is clinical rather than mechanistic, Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience and other Frontiers titles take work that is physiological in method but specialised in system, and Physiological Reports offers a society-backed open access alternative with a sound-science rather than novelty-driven editorial threshold. None of these titles is interchangeable: the deciding questions are whether the paper's claim is mechanistic, how specialised its audience is, and which access and fee model the authors' funder requires.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the ISSN of Frontiers in Physiology? Its electronic ISSN is 1664-042X. No print ISSN is recorded in the stored JournalsWorld record, the DOAJ listing or the OpenAlex record consulted; the journal is an online title.

Who publishes Frontiers in Physiology? Frontiers Media S.A., based in Switzerland. The journal's country is recorded as CH in both the DOAJ listing and the OpenAlex source record.

Is Frontiers in Physiology open access? Yes. It is a fully open access journal; articles are published under the CC BY licence, authors retain copyright, and the journal is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals under ISSN 1664-042X.

How much does it cost to publish? The journal's own fees pages list CHF 3,150 for A-type articles, CHF 2,500 for B-type articles and no charge for C-type articles, at the time of checking. Institutional partnership support and fee support for authors in lower-income countries may reduce or cover the charge. Always confirm the current figure for your section before submitting.

What impact and citation figures does the journal report? Its own Facts panel presents an Impact Factor of 4.3 and a CiteScore of 8. The stored JournalsWorld record gives an h-index of 195 and a Q2 classification, while OpenAlex recorded an h-index of 234 and about 4.06 two-year mean citedness at checking time. The figures differ because the databases count different material.

Does the journal accept clinical research? Only where a physiological mechanism is central. The journal states that manuscripts focusing solely on clinical or medical research are not suitable, and that such work will be redirected to sister titles such as Frontiers in Medicine or Frontiers in Oncology.

How is peer review organised? By specialty section, under a single anonymised model with an interactive discussion stage between authors and reviewers, and with the section's Associate Editor taking the acceptance decision, as described on the journal's About page.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile is based on the stored JournalsWorld record for post 2684 (title, slug frontiers-in-physiology, ISSN 1664-042X, coverage from 2010, h-index 195, Q2 classification); the journal's About page and section publishing-fees pages on frontiersin.org, consulted for scope, sections, editors, review model, indexing list and fees; the DOAJ search API record for ISSN 1664-042X, which records Frontiers Media S.A. as publisher, CC BY licensing, an APC and an anonymised review process; and the OpenAlex source record S52732750 resolved from the ISSN endpoint, whose counts are snapshots at checking time. A current editor for every individual section could not be verified from the pages consulted, so only the Field Chief Editor named on the journal's own About page is given. Acceptance rates and review timelines are not published in the sources consulted and are therefore not stated here.