Welcome to Communications Chemistry, the third in the new family of Communications journals launched by Nature Research. Today we are delighted to publish our first articles, joining our sister journals Communications Biology and Communications Physics .

The chemistry portfolio at Nature Research has seen considerable expansion and development over the past few years. Nature Chemistry and Nature Communications have continued to select and publish excellent research across the chemical sciences, and recently they have been joined by Nature Reviews Chemistry and Nature Catalysis . We hope that Communications Chemistry will complement this suite of journals. By providing an open access, multidisciplinary forum for publication of high-quality chemistry papers of interest to narrower groups of researchers, we can now provide a home for exciting chemistry research regardless of the scope or breadth of the paper.

Our name reflects where we sit in the Nature Research family of journals. We are closely related to, but different from, Nature Communications. As part of Nature Research, we will adhere to the same publishing policies and apply the level of editorial rigour expected by authors and readers alike. As an open access journal, we will ensure that published research is accessible to the widest possible readership and we will work closely with our press team to ensure that work of public interest is highly visible.

How then do we differ? In part, this comes down to how our journal is staffed. Communications Chemistry operates a shared editorial model, with full-time professional in-house editors working alongside an Editorial Board consisting of active researchers. We hope that this arrangement will provide the best of both worlds for our authors and reviewers, with the editorial experience of professional editors combined with the up-to-date technical expertise and links to the community that the Editorial Board can bring. Regardless of who handles your paper, we will work together to make our decisions as fair, transparent and efficient as possible. Our editorial threshold also differs from that of the other Nature Research journals. This means that we can consider work that provides fundamental insight into chemical processes, or advances in the applied side of the field, without the need for articles or reviews to be of broad, general interest outside a specialist community.

We are aware that for many chemists the term communications refers primarily to short form articles, published quickly. We have certainly endeavoured to streamline every aspect of our editorial process (times to primary decision were typically in the range of 4–7 days for papers submitted in 2017), but we are not limited to one manuscript format. A glance through our launch content highlights the breadth of areas that we will cover, as well as of the range of article lengths that we consider. We have a computational method for evaluating transition state energies in dehydrogenation reactions (Abild-Pedersen et al.), a demonstration of macroscale chiral recognition (Harada et al.), and a spectroscopic analysis of ultrafast reaction processes (Yamanouchi et al.). The papers published today include studies that may be of interest to researchers in adjacent research fields, for example, the use of composite membranes for gas separation applications (Sun et al.), or the incorporation of metal-organic frameworks into supercapacitors (Zhang et al.). We also have some shorter form articles reporting an elastomer with high strength and ultrastrechability (Miwa et al.), and an analysis of the speciation of tungsten in bone tissue (Bohle et al.). Clearly, this is a small sample and there are many areas of chemistry where we have not yet published anything. That said, we have more articles, reviews and commentary in the pipeline and our editors will be actively engaging with the community to ensure that as a journal we represent the full spectrum of chemistry research.

At this point, we would like to take the opportunity to thank all of the authors, reviewers and Editorial Board Members who have already supported us. We are still growing and we are happy to receive input from the community as we evolve. Our editors and Editorial Board Members will be available at meetings and conferences throughout the year and we are always interested in your feedback, be it face to face or electronic. For the time being, today marks the beginning of an exciting journey for Communications Chemistry, and it is one that we look forward to embarking on together.