Communications Biology turns five!

Press team highlights

A cornerstone of academic publishing is producing content that resonates with a broader, non-expert audience. Springer Nature’s Press Team has been working tirelessly with the editors of Communications Biology over the past five years to promote and disseminate newsworthy articles to scientific outlets and mass media outlets. Therefore, celebrating our fifth anniversary, together with the Press and Communications Team, we compiled a Collection of articles that fared particularly well in the press and highlight the appeal the journal has for various fields, and cross-disciplinary audiences. Traveling through the years, the reader will notice that the increasing press coverage echoes the growth and impact trajectory of Communications Biology. 

There’s ongoing interest in the 2018 work on population declines of coastal apex sharks since the 1960s and news in Japan and India, in addition to science outlets, covered our papers on microbial proliferation in oceanic basalt interface crust and the stinging-cell structures of the jellyfish Cassiopeia xamachana. An impressive string of palaeobiology-based papers were widely cited in the media, from the discovery of a Tyrannosaurus rex cousin or a swimming non-avian dinosaur to the link between feeding-induced stress and skull opening evolution in mesozoic archosaurs and a giant rhino from the Oligocene.

In 2022, life science enthusiasts around the world enjoyed the journal’s output on the unique vocal sequences of Chimpanzees, the encouraging report that the giant Galapgaos Chelonoidis tortoise is not extinct and how wild African elephant orphans rely on social support for their physiology. Our articles on opportunistic infections following a 16th-century patient’s gallstone and the connection of parasitic infection and risk-taking in Yellowstone National Park gray wolves enjoyed a lot of coverage in Italy and Germany, in addition to archaeology and ecology outlets.
 

Expectedly, news media did not miss the opportunity to test their punning skills on work published on the arachnid online market - we(b) forgive them. The survival and future perspectives of the planet’s species caught readers’ attention alike, especially a report on habitat fragmentation for the platypus by dam building and work estimating that species with a ‘data deficient’ catalog status are highly threatened by extinction. Going into our fifth year at Communications Biology, we celebrated our most-covered paper in May 2022 as the story of Arabidopsis plants grown in moon soil caught the attention of hundreds of media outlets worldwide. 

EBM highlights

We pride ourselves on the collaborative model at Communications Biology (and its sister journals) - our Editorial Board is central to the informed assessment of submitted manuscripts and a paper’s journey through the peer-review process until publication. Our Editorial Board has been growing significantly over the years and several of our Board members have been with us from the beginning or for numerous years. In this anniversary Collection, over a dozen of our long-serving Editorial Board members highlight their favorite manuscripts at Communications Biology.

Editor highlights

In this Collection on the occasion of our fifth anniversary, our team of in-house editors picked their favorite manuscripts from the sub-fields they regularly handle. Much like the work highlighted by our Editorial Board members, the research selected here showcases the breadth of different sub-fields the journal has grown an author- and readership in since 2018 and continues to publish significant advances for the respective communities. Our in-house editors have chosen work from cognitive neuroscience to plant biology, from cancer research to computational biology and bioengineering that was published in Communications Biology over the last five years - enjoy!