Honestly I can't recommend Frontiers without also encouraging some skepticism -
Posts about frontiers written by Kate Travis, Ellie Kincaid, Avery Orrall, Adam Marcus, Victoria Stern, Alison McCook, and Dalmeet Singh Chawla
retractionwatch.com
It's not that it's all bad, it's that one of the pitfalls of certain open access models is the "pay to publish" encouraging bad editorial practices. Honestly even the most prestigious journals out there, with the very best editorial boards and peer reviewers, it's good to scrutinize and look for the signs of bad scholarship.
Recently I was doing some research on chaga and this article in a Frontiers publication concerned me.
Inonotus obliquus (Chaga) is an inexpensive fungus with a broad range of traditional and medicinal applications. These applications include therapy for breas...
www.frontiersin.org
The pictured mushroom is
not the mushroom of
Inonotus obliquus. The fruiting body (aka mushroom) of
Inonotus obliquus looks like a sheen of pores on the wood of a decaying tree, not a conk like they show. It's not even a "maybe if conditions are right it would form that way" sort of thing - it would never look like that. And on top of that, the chaga part is not a mushroom at all. It's the sclerotum of the fungus, which produces no spores and just stores nutrients for the fungus more or less. And yet they call it the "chaga mushroom" and show pictures of some other species.
Even if other aspects of the information are correct, it throws up a lot of red flags for poor editorial standards and lack of effort or knowledge on the part of the authors, which surprises me given their positions but you know that publication grind pushes a lot of shoddy work at times. And perhaps one of the collaborators who knew less about the subject committed the errors and the others were too busy to notice.
