For this first round of question-and-answer, we’d like to focus on the peer review and publishing process at Nature Publishing. Several editors have agreed to take your questions on this topic:

Maxine Clarke, publishing executive editor, Nature
Linda Miller, U.S executive editor, Nature Publishing Group
Ritu Dhand, chief biological sciences editor, Nature
Karl Ziemelis, chief physical sciences editor, Nature
Natalie DeWitt, senior editor, Nature
Laurie Dempsey, senior editor, Nature Immunology

If you have a question specific to one of the other Nature journals, post it and we’ll try to get the right person to answer it.

Answers to your questions may already be available so take a look at Nature Publishing Group’s page for authors, which includes information about peer review.

We ask you to follow a few basic ground rules.

1. Post each question as a separate topic in the forum. This will help keep the questions organized.

2. Read through the questions already posted before putting up yours. We don’t want multiple versions of the same question.

3. Don’t post questions about a specific paper or a specific area of research. Our editors will not answer questions like: “Why did you reject my paper?”, “Why did you publish this paper?” or “Are you interested in publishing papers in my area of interest X?” The editors may decide to not answer a question if it’s not appropriate in a public forum.

4. Examples of appropriate questions are: What do you look for in a paper? How do you pick reviewers? How does the appeal process work?

5. Stay on topic. Questions that are clearly off-topic or inappropriate will be deleted.

Over the coming months, we’ll have other rounds of Q&A focused on different topics related to publishing, such as careers in scientific publishing and online communications tools for scientists. Please hold your questions on these topics until the next rounds.

If there are other topics you’d like us to cover in the future in this forum, please post your suggestions as replies to this topic. And if you have any questions about this forum, you can post those questions as replies here as well.