Unsurprisingly, Nature's Letters and Articles frequently stimulate responses from the authors' peers. In particular, a reader may submit an attack on the core of a paper. It is then our duty to take it up with authors and referees. If the attack turns out to be well founded, a retraction or correction will follow.

If the criticism is significant but is contested, we publish it in our Brief Communications Arising (BCA) section with a response from the authors. Until now, space limitations have restricted our ability to publish all but the most significant of such debates. But from next week's issue we shall be increasing the number of such BCAs by publishing them online only, drawing attention to them by their titles and authors in the print edition's Brief Communications section and our table of contents. The BCAs will be citable by their Digital Object Identifiers, like all Nature content, and forward-linked from the original paper. This expansion will also allow us occasionally to publish comments that are more positively stimulating.

Such feedback needs no prompting. In contrast, in another enhancement, we wish to solicit feedback from authors of our papers in order to improve the service that they receive. Thus, from 1 January this year, all authors are being invited to complete an online feedback form about aspects of editorial services, from refereeing quality to efficiency and transparency in handling.

And there are two improvements in navigation for readers. One relates to our research papers. Many carry additional information for specialists in their online Supplementary Information, which has become more extensive in recent years. Readers will find that the presentation of this has been redesigned for quicker and easier access.

And finally (for now), we have introduced new internal search (or ‘semantic matching’) technology that allows us to scan the complete online content of Nature journals and automatically generate updated web links to related articles on request via a click on the left-hand margin of online Nature content.

As always, Nature welcomes readers' comments about these enhancements, and suggestions for others.