The traditional stamping grounds of Nature and the Nature journals have been the fundamental sciences — the physical, chemical, biological, Earth and environmental sciences. Three journals launched this week restate our editorial and publishing commitment to these territories. And one of them also delves into other disciplines, especially the social sciences, in tackling some of the ‘grand challenges’ facing society.

Nature Energy is the journal with the broadest scope. Like Nature Climate Change and Nature Plants, it includes social science and policy research: the first issue features papers on ‘Policy trade-offs between climate mitigation and clean cook-stove access in South Asia’ and ‘Impacts of a 32-billion-gallon bioenergy landscape on land and fossil fuel use in the US’. But the journal is also committed to the natural sciences — and indeed to any research that assists humankind in getting to grips with the challenges of energy generation, storage and distribution. In short, Nature Energy will attend to how science, technologies and people can deliver, and are affected by, any and all energy systems.

Like Nature and all other Nature research and reviews journals, Nature Energy’s choice of what to publish lies entirely in the hands of its in-house editors, who are supported by external peer reviewers. Everyone on the editorial team (which includes a social scientist) sits in the same office and is able to work closely together in assessing submissions. This is of particular value when dealing with multidisciplinary submissions — a challenge that the journal sees as one of its principal missions.

Materials research is a key component of the energy-research landscape. It also contributes fundamental insights into materials themselves and provides contexts in which materials can be applied. High time, our editors and publishers concluded, that a Nature journal should survey progress across all these fronts: hence this week’s launch of Nature Reviews Materials . Like the other two journals, it is an online-only subscription journal.

The launch issue includes reviews that outline the computational design of energy materials, the latest advances in photovoltaic devices, the surface properties of superhydrophobic and icephobic materials, the synthesis of carbon nanostructures and the design of pro-angiogenic materials, which are valuable in combating cardiovascular disease. It also focuses on sustainable materials, immunotherapy materials and the history of nanotechnology and the electronics industry. Nature Reviews Materials aims to cover the making, measuring, modelling and manufacturing of materials — looking at materials all the way from laboratory discovery to their use in functional devices. And in the coming months, the journal will analyse the impact that materials research can make in the field of medicine and on our environment, ensuring a healthier and more sustainable future.

The third journal is Nature Microbiology . As the most abundant living entities on our planet, microorganisms are fundamental to every facet of life on Earth. Nature Microbiology is interested in all aspects of microorganisms, be it their evolution, physiology and cell biology; their interactions with each other, a host or an environment; or their societal significance. The editors of Nature Microbiology are keen for the journal to be inclusive of all types of microorganism, whether bacterial, viral, archaeal or eukaryotic in nature. Accordingly, the launch issue features articles on a diverse array of microorganisms and topics, including the speciation of wild yeasts by hybridization, the global distribution of and disease burden caused by a bacterium and the identification of a virus that borrows its capsid coat from another virus.

Increasingly, researchers, their funders — both public and private — and their institutions recognize that great research needs to be pursued in both fundamental and societally useful domains. Such research needs to be inclusive, in disciplinary terms, and to aim for the highest standards of robustness. It is our hope that the Nature group of journals can support these ambitions, and notably so in the launches this week.