Accessibility is a fundamental concern at Nature Reviews Neuroscience. We try to feature articles from every branch of the neurosciences, but our aim is that they should be enjoyed by anyone with a broad interest in the nervous system, even if the article falls outside the reader's area of expertise. Although it might sound simple, this idea is particularly challenging when it comes to the brain, because it is studied at many levels that may not even share the same vocabulary. In other words, it can be hard to make sure that an article on ion channels will be accessible to someone interested in brain imaging, or that an article on neural development will make sense to someone in the field of neuropharmacology.

But we do occasionally encounter areas in which the boundaries across fields are already blurred and there is much more common ground between researchers working at opposite ends of a given problem. The study of the calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II (CaMKII) is a prototypical example. CaMKII has long been proposed to act as a switch for the long-term storage of synaptic memory. As Lisman, Schulman and Cline review in this issue (page 175), many disciplines have converged on this idea from different perspectives, making it possible to bridge fields that range from structural biology and biochemistry to behavioural neuroscience and neural development. Research on CaMKII is one of the best examples of an integrative approach to the study of the nervous system. And at a time when we need to integrate across many levels to make better sense of the workings of the brain, cases like CaMKII must be regarded as important steps in the right direction.