Nature Communications to launch in April 2010
Maxine Clarke
Thursday, 24 September 2009 14:27 UTC
In April 2010, Nature Publishing Group will launch a new journal, Nature Communications , which will publish peer-reviewed research across the biological, chemical and physical sciences, particularly papers that describe a multidisciplinary approach. The Editor will be Dr Lesley Anson, a biophysicist who up until now has been a senior editor at Nature , handling submitted manuscripts and overseeing the journal’s Insights programme. Authors will be able to publish their work either via the traditional subscription route, or as open access through payment of an article processing charge. The journal will soon have a preliminary website, and I’ll post the URL here as soon as it is available. More information is available in the company press release and on this Great Beyond blog post. There is also some immediate online reaction at Twitter and Friend Feed .
Updated 24 September 2009 17:13 UTC
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And Nature Communications has a Nature Network forum. Please join for updates and news about this new journal, and to ask your questions.
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I’m amused by the reactions from some OA advocates: NPG can’t do anything right, can they?
It’ll be interesting to see how this develops. Is NPG dipping it toes in the OA water, so that we might see a slew of OA journals appearing in the next couple of years?
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Well, as one sees so often on the internet, reactions can be ill-informed and made without even reading or processing the article one is reacting to.
NPG has long been experimenting and using various publishing business models. For example the Signaling Gateway is, in part, a peer-reviewed, edited database of cell signalling molecules, free for anyone to read and co-supported by a partner. NPG publishes several other databases by these means.
We regularly publish collections, focuses, Insights, single articles and other content free to access by partnership with sponsors or advertisers (making the relationship between sponsor and content clear in each case).
Taking OA in particular, NPG announced 2 weeks ago another new journal, Cell Death & Disease, a new OA (not hybrid) online-only journal. NPG has also been publishing Molecular Systems Biology, a fully OA journal, since 2005 and offers the OA option for 14 other journals. For a few years now, Nature journals publish papers describing genome sequences by creative commons license (free to read online).
There is a very good, well-considered Editorial in Nature Materials last month (free to read online!) about the practical considerations of OA for high-quality journals. I recommend reading it
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I was about to ask where the OA reactions were that Bob referred to, but then I spotted the FriendFeed link in the post, and knew not to look any further. =)
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In defence of Pat Brown, whilst NPG have been good supporters of OA through self-archiving they have also made it very clear that for Nature-branded journals paid OA was never going to be an option. Mol Syst Biol and other NPG journals with paid OA options are all in the academic journals stable of NPG.
I’m not clear whether this new journal is intended as NPG’s answer to PLoS ONE – i.e. a vehicle to publish anything that is good science – or whether it is going to be highly selective as all the other Nature-branded titles are.
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Frank, just to respond to your comment that OA “was never going to be an option” for Nature branded journals. As the editorial that Maxine links to explains, there are a number of practical considerations when it comes to OA in highly selective journals.
Essentially, we publish only a few papers per year (Nature Materials: 133 in 2007), so as you can imagine distributing pretty much our entire publication costs amongst such few authors would mean significant if not drastic publication fees. In comparison, you will find that typically OA journals publish much more than 133 papers a year. So even if you take a neutral stance to OA, it is such considerations that create a fundamental problem with most Nature branded journals. Still, as the editorial also mentions, we do provide a number of free services to the scientific community where possible, Nature Network being a good example :-)
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In response to the question about what kind of journal Nature Communications will be, I’m happy to let you know that it won’t be like PLoS ONE. Yes, both journals have a multidisciplinary scope and publish only online. But Nature Communications has a hybrid business model, meaning that it publishes both open access and subscription-access papers — the choice is up to the author. Moreover, like all Nature-branded journals, Nature Communications will select what it considers to be the most important and relevant papers for its various communities through rigorous peer-review. The general interest of these papers won’t be as significant as papers published in Nature and the Nature research journals, but the quality of the science that is presented will be just as high.
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Best of luck with the journal, Lesley.
Hope you don’t get inundated with too much wingnut-tery masquerading as “interdisciplinary research”…
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PS I’m thinking of stuff like this.
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I haven’t (dared to) check(ed) out your link, Austin, but having been a colleague of Lesley and her N Comms team for many years in their previous guises, I’m not worried. ;-)
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