Since its inception, this journal has benefitted from our community's willingness to participate in a Correspondence section covering the commercial, ethical, societal and legal aspects of bioengineering research. On occasion, our Correspondence pages are also home to short peer-reviewed descriptions of biological or social science research relevant to biotech. To bring the journal in line with other Nature research journals, however, we are discontinuing the practice of publishing new research data and methodology in the Correspondence section. Instead, such studies will now be considered as Brief Communications.

In addition to harmonizing publication practice with our sister journals, we anticipate authors will receive several benefits from publishing research data and methodology outside Correspondence pages. First, all research will now have an extensive description of how data were generated via an Online Methods section (in contrast, methodology in Correspondence often ends up in Supplementary Information). Second, we can provide tables of source data behind graphs and figures and offer additional information about author contributions as well as data accessibility statements and a published reproducibility checklist. Third, authors will now find their research categorized as 'Research' rather than 'News and Comment', where Correspondence currently resides. And, finally, all research published in Nature Biotechnology will now have a searchable abstract and metadata that will be indexed by PubMed.

The policy applies to all new submissions from this issue onwards. We look forward to publishing all research, from the whole of our purview, with the same functionality and features. We also encourage the community to continue to use our Correspondence pages to make announcements and raise awareness about the myriad practical, economic, social, legal and ethical aspects that surround biotech research.