We are very excited to announce that Loop was launched today! It’s been a challenging and exciting journey, and the Frontiers team and myself are all truly proud to introduce Loop, the first research network that is open to be integrated into any publisher’s or academic organization’s website. Loop profiles are already integrated into many places of the Frontiers platform: into our article pages, editorial boards and our Collaborative Review Forum, for example. We are honored to announce that our first partner to integrate Loop into their article pages is Nature Publishing Group.

When we launched Frontiers back in 2007, we were full of dreams that have since become a reality.

We dreamt of the ultimate Open-Science platform, where the academic community can take publishing into their own hands to build fair, transparent and community-driven journals, make their discoveries freely accessible toanybody in the world, so they can be read and re-used without any boundaries.

We dreamt of a platform that would benefit researchers and society beyond open access publishing, a place where our discoveries would become easily understandable to the world, where we could get feedback on the performance of our articles and the readership for our articles would be magically enhanced by clever software.

We invented impact metrics for articles in an online environment in 2008, and in 2010 for authors, enabling researchers to obtain real-time feedback on their performance.  More recently, we created an open access journal for young audiences that that involves kids and teens in the review process and translates today’s research articles into an easily understandable language so the youth and public can truly enjoy and benefit from cutting-edge research.

Today we launched Loop.

Our dream for Loop was simple: increase readership for articles and enhance the reputation of academics within their academic communities and even beyond to society in general. Actors, sportsmen and reality TV personalities have all become household names, yet our true modern day heroes who are making groundbreaking discoveries in science, medicine, engineering and humanities – those who are building the very fabric of our modern society – are mostly unknown to the public. Loop celebrates these researchers and their discoveries and is committed to maximize the readership for their articles and to raise their academic and public impact.

Loop offers a rich set of features to automatically promote academic achievements. Most significantly, Loop is the only network that integrates into third-party websites, boosting visibility even further. For the very first time, academics are discoverable via their published content and across all participating publishers and organizations. Loop also offers detailed impact metrics and machine learning algorithms that disseminate research articles to the people that matter. Loop works on behalf of researchers to maximize the readership and impact of their work.

However, this is just the beginning of our journey, and there are many exciting projects in the pipeline to further our dream of optimally promoting researchers and their fantastic contributions to the world. Please join us on what is sure to be a thrilling ride.  We hope you enjoy everything that Loop has to offer!