Editors at Nature frequently receive passionate pleas from aspiring authors that publication of their paper is crucial for a grant, a position or for some other prospect. The scientific profession to which these authors belong is locked into a reward system based excessively on quantitative assessments, such as the number of papers published in journals that have a particular impact factor.

This broadening of the role of leading journals raises the stakes for authors. They are used to writing for fellow scientists within the discipline who will pore over every word of the methods section and have little patience with perceived hyperbole about the greater meaning of the results. Publication in these journals also requires authors to make the most of the superb opportunity to communicate to an audience far wider than their immediate peers.

Authors who submit to an interdisciplinary journal have to consider a second readership: scientists outside the discipline. These scientists read the paper for other reasons, such as a simple interest in the breadth of science, teaching, applying a new technique or observation to their own system, or ambitions to apply their discipline's armoury to the scientific challenge discussed. Nature has long guided its authors in this process, as their sometimes excruciatingly technical initial manuscripts travel the road towards publication in a more readable form. But authors can do more for intelligibility themselves at the outset, by showing papers to researchers with other backgrounds before submitting.

Nature provides researchers with other help, too, in the form of greatly increased efficiency and transparency in its handling of papers, via a new web-based submission system that allows authors to track the progress of their papers through the refereeing process. We have also revised our Guide to Authors (see page 868) to provide clearer advice about how to write a paper. And we now actively encourage authors to be transparent by identifying which co-author contributed what to the work, in a section published at the end of the paper, and ensure that all authors are signed up to our principles of data access and materials sharing (see http://www.nature.com/nature/submit/policies for details of these and other improvements).

In addition, Nature invites authors to help us present their results to diverse audiences. In submitting a paper, authors are now asked for two summaries: one to summarize their work for readers (mainly scientists and editors), and another to crystallize the importance of their work for the general public. Nature will draw on these in the presentation and promotion of its papers.

Researchers are increasingly recognizing their duties towards broader readerships, not least the media and the more scientifically interested public. And where science can get distorted or smothered, researchers cannot sit back and let the journals do all the work for them. True, Nature's role is to publish the most innovative and influential papers that scientists can produce, and to present these results to the public. But it is the responsibility of researchers to seize the initiative, and communicate their knowledge and uncertainties to avoid misconceptions — and sometimes even to campaign to get science's messages across. Nature will continue to guide the media to authors of papers so that they are centrally involved in these opportunities.