How to publish your paper
Getting your research paper published in a Nature journal
Nature journal pledge to authors
Editors of the Nature journals strive to provide authors with an outstandingly efficient, fair and thoughtful submission, peer review and publishing experience. Authors can expect all manuscripts that are published to be scrutinized for peer-review with the utmost professional rigor and care by expert referees who are selected by the editors for their ability to provide incisive and useful analysis. Editors weigh many factors when choosing content for Nature journals, but they strive to minimize the time taken to make decisions about publication while maintaining the highest possible quality of that decision.
After review, editors work to increase a paper's readability, and thereby its audience, through advice and editing, so that all research is presented in a form that is both readable to those in the field and understandable to scientists outside the immediate discipline. Research is published online without delay through our advance online publication system. Nature journals provide more than 3,000 registered journalists with weekly press releases that mention all research papers to be published. About 800,000 registered users receive e-mailed tables of contents, and many papers are highlighted for the nonspecialist reader on the journal's homepage, contents pages and in News and Views.
Throughout this process, the editors of Nature journals uphold editorial, ethical and scientific standards according to the policies outlined on the author and referee site as well as on our journal websites. We periodically review those policies to ensure that they continue to reflect the needs of the scientific community, and welcome comments and suggestions from scientists, either via the feedback links on the author and referees' website or via our author blog, Nautilus, or peer-review blog, Peer to Peer.
How to publish your research in a Nature journal
The Nature journals comprise the weekly, multidisciplinary Nature, which publishes research of the highest influence within a discipline that will be of interest to scientists in other fields, and fifteen monthly titles, publishing papers of the highest quality and of exceptional impact in the disciplines indicated by their titles: Nature Biotechnology, Nature Cell Biology, Nature Chemical Biology, Nature Chemistry, Nature Genetics, Nature Geoscience, Nature Immunology, Nature Materials, Nature Medicine, Nature Methods, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Neuroscience, Nature Photonics, Nature Physics and Nature Structural and Molecular Biology. These journals are international, being published and printed in the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan. See here for more information about the relationship between these journals.
Nature and the Nature monthly journals have impact factors that are among the highest in the world. The high prestige of these journals brings many rewards to their authors, but also means that competition for publication is severe, so many submissions have to be declined without peer-review.
The Nature journals differ from most other journals in that they do not have editorial boards, but instead are run by professional editors who consult widely among the scientific community in making decisions about publication of papers. This article is to provide you with an overview of the general editorial processes of these unique journals. Although the journals are broadly similar and share editorial policies, all authors need to consult the author information pages of the specific Nature journal before submitting, to obtain detailed information on criteria for publication and manuscript preparation for that journal, as some differences exist.
Editorial Process
The following sections summarise the journals' editorial processes and describe how manuscripts are handled by editors between submission and publication. At all stages of the process, you can access the online submission system and find the status of your manuscript.
Presubmission enquiries
Researchers may obtain informal feedback from editors before submitting the whole paper. This service is intended to save you time — if the editors feel it would not be suitable, you can submit the manuscript to another journal without delay. If you wish to use the presubmission enquiry service, please use the online system of the journal of your choice to send a paragraph explaining the importance of your paper, as well as the abstract or summary paragraph with its associated citation list so the editors may judge the paper in relation to other related work. The editors will quickly either invite you to submit the whole manuscript (which does not mean any commitment to publication), or will say that it is not suitable for the journal. If you receive a negative response, please do not reply. If you are convinced of the importance of your paper despite editors' reservations, you may submit the whole manuscript using the journal's online submission system. The editors can then make a more complete assessment of your work.
Initial submission
When you are ready to submit the paper, please use the online submission system for the journal concerned. When the journal receives your manuscript, it will be assigned a number and an editor, who reads the paper, seeks informal advice from scientific advisors and editorial colleagues, and compares your submission to other recently published papers in the field. If the paper seems novel and arresting, and the work described has both immediate and far-reaching implications, the editor will send it out for peer-review, usually to two or three independent specialists. However, because the journals can publish only a very few of the papers in the field or subfield concerned, many papers have to be declined without peer-review even though they may describe solid scientific results.
Transfers between Nature journals
In some cases, an editor is unable to offer publication, but might suggest that the manuscript is more suitable for one of the other Nature journals. If you wish to resubmit your manuscript to the suggested journal, you can simply follow the link provided by the editor to transfer your manuscript and the reviewers' comments to the new journal. This process is entirely in your control: you can choose not to use this service and instead to submit your manuscript to any other Nature or Nature Publishing Group journal, with or without including the reviewers' comments if you wish, using the journal's usual online submission service.
Peer review
The corresponding author is notified by e-mail when an editor decides to send a paper for review. The editors choose referees for their independence, ability to evaluate the technical aspects of the paper fully and fairly, whether they are currently or recently assessing related submissions, and whether they can review the manuscript within the short time requested.
You may suggest referees for your paper (including address details), so long as they are independent scientists. These suggestions are often helpful, although they are not always followed. Editors will honour your requests to exclude a limited number of named scientists as reviewers.
Decisions and revisions
When making a decision about publication in the light of reviewers' comments, editors consider not only how good the paper is now, but also how good it might become after revision. When all the reviewers' comments have been received, the editors discuss a manuscript among themselves and then write to the author. In this letter, the editor will either decline to publish your paper, or suggest that you revise it for resubmission, or offer to publish it without further revision. If the editor suggests revising your paper, he or she will provide specific suggestions, will state in the letter whether the revisions are major or minor, and whether further consultation with referees is likely when you resubmit the revised version.
If the editor invites you to revise your manuscript, you should include with your resubmitted version a new cover letter that includes a point-by-point response to the reviewers' and editors' comments, including an explanation of how you have altered your manuscript in response to these, and an estimation of the length of the revised version with figures/tables.
Additional supplementary information is published with the online version of your paper if the editors and referees have judged that it is essential for the conclusions of the paper (for example, a large table of data or the derivation of a model) but of more specialist interest than the rest of the paper. Editors encourage authors whose papers describe methods to provide a summary of the method for the print version and to include full details and protocols online. Authors are also encouraged to post the full protocol in the journal Nature Protocols, which as well as a protocols database provides an online forum for readers in the field to add comments, suggestions and refinements to the published protocols.
After acceptance
Your accepted manuscript is prepared for publication by copy editors (also called subeditors), who refine it so that the text and figures are readable and clear to those outside the immediate field; choose keywords to maximize visibility in online searches as well as suitable for indexing services; and ensure that the papers conform to house style. The copy editors are happy to give advice to authors whose native language is not English, and will edit those papers with special care.
After publication
All papers are published in the print edition and, in PDF and HTML format, in the online edition of the journal, in full. Many linking and navigational services are provided with the online (HTML) version of all papers published by the Nature journals.
All papers and contact details of corresponding authors are included in our press release service, which means that your work is drawn to the attention of all the main media organizations in the world, who may choose to feature the work in newspaper and other media reports. Some papers are summarized and highlighted within Nature and Nature Publishing Group publications and subject-specific websites.
Journals published by Nature Publishing Group do not ask authors for copyright, but instead ask you to sign an exclusive publishing license. This allows you to archive the accepted version of your paper six months after publication on your own, your institution's, and your funder's websites.
Disagreements with decisions
If a journal's editors are unable to offer publication of a manuscript and have not invited resubmission, you are strongly advised to submit your paper for publication elsewhere. However, if you believe that the editors or reviewers have seriously misunderstood your paper, you may write to the editors, explaining the scientific reasons why you believe the decision was incorrect. Please bear in mind that editors prioritise newly submitted manuscripts and manuscripts where resubmission has been invited, so it can take several weeks before letters of disagreement can be answered. During this time, you must not submit your manuscript elsewhere. In the interests of publishing your results without unnecessary delay, we therefore advise you to submit your paper to another journal if it has been declined, rather than to spend time on corresponding further with the editors of the declining journal.
