When it comes to text, Nature has always quite consciously followed a tight publication format. It may surprise some that the reason for this is not to save on paper (or trees), but instead to make papers more accessible to a broad readership. To some, more text implies more accessibility. We beg to differ: well-crafted, accurate and concise text is the most efficient vehicle to communicate complex scientific information. Rambling repetitive text, which gets stuck in unnecessary detail or history, serves only to confuse. It also puts off the general reader, who has limited time to read beyond the literature immediately relevant to their research. Of course, it is necessary to achieve the right balance so that all essential information can be provided and understood by as wide a readership as possible.

Catering for a slightly more specialist audience, the Nature Research Journals have a more relaxed set of format requirements that, in our opinion, give adequate space for a detailed contextualization and discussion of the data. Nevertheless, format is one of the most frequent reasons given for shying away from submission — or indeed to explain a lack of experimental data. These authors fail to appreciate that Nature Cell Biology is actually comparable to alternative venues for publication when data and text presented in supplementary information is included (as it should be, given that supplementary information is a fully peer reviewed integral part of Nature Cell Biology papers and is therefore included in the main PDF file): Nature Cell Biology articles contain an average 9,006 words (7,903 in the main paper), with 11.5 figures (6.4 in the main paper) composed of 46.9 individual panels (26.8 in main paper). Compare this to The Journal of Cell Biology — 9,472 words average text length (9,248 in main paper), 10.1 figures (8.4 in the paper) with 31 panels (24.9 in the paper); or Cell — 11,042 words (10,188 in paper), 11.7 figures (6.7 in paper) with 48.3 panels (33.5 in paper). Importantly, Cell papers contain approximately the same amount of data as Nature Cell Biology articles, and The Journal of Cell Biology papers contain somewhat less. Cell papers contain 229 words per display panel, whereas Nature Cell Biology articles contain 192 and The Journal of Cell Biology papers are 5% longer than Nature Cell Biology articles. Of course, Nature Cell Biology letters are shorter (5,961 words and 8.0 figures, of which 4.7 are in the main paper, and 33.5 panels with 25 in the main paper), but articles represent approximately 30% of our papers, and we will not cut down a paper to letter format if this damages the contentsFootnote 1.

A valid criticism of the terse format of Nature has been the occasional difficulty in reproducing data based on the methods provided. It is certainly true that dependence on the citation of previous studies using similar methods can lead to inaccuracies. At the Nature research titles, we do not enforce a strict limitation of the methods section for this reason. Notably, Nature has also addressed this issue by publishing bipartite methods henceforth: a short summary in the main paper and an online document with extended methods in the supplementary information.

We do hope this addresses any rumblings about excessive format restrictions.