Commitment to our authors

Nature Communications helps you to disseminate impactful research articles in all areas of the natural and clinical sciences. Because we are an open access journal, your results are immediately available upon publication to your research community and beyond. 

Submit your paper with Nature Communications here.

High editorial standards

When you submit to our journal, your manuscript is handled by our in-house, professional editors who are educated to PhD level, often with several years of postdoctoral experience and have a scientific background in the areas they handle. Our in-house editors are dedicated to serving the research community and the work that researchers entrust to our care; they regularly engage with researchers and frequently attend conferences and meetings to stay up-to-date with advances in their fields.

"Excellent editorial handling of paper, thorough review process but very fair. Excellent production of final article and great support from Nature press office."

Author

Our editors provide a quick and balanced assessment of the manuscripts submitted to our journal, with a median decision time for first decisions of 10 days. They uphold the same rigorous peer review process as Nature and the Nature-branded journals, and their independence from the research community reduces the chance of any personal bias. Our editors work with authors and peer reviewers to improve the manuscript by moderating the comments from reviewers and providing authors with specific guidance on revision.

"An efficient team who handle different part of the process, and bring the publication online fast"

Author

Besides our editors, we also have a dedicated team of Editorial Assistants, Proofreaders and Production Editors that assist authors, editors and peer reviewers throughout the submission-to-publication process.

Supporting open and transparent science

Our CC-BY license allows for maximum dissemination and is preferred by many research bodies.

We actively support community preprint servers by highlighting preprints that are under review, we encourage open data practices and we mandate public deposition of several important data types. 

We give you the opportunity to publish your peer review reports and point-by-point responses alongside your paper, and we give reviewers the choice of whether they would like to be named in recognition of their work on the published article.

“All stages of the editorial process were transparent, forthcoming, and swift.”

Author

We continuously strive to make the peer review process more transparent. Watch this space for new initiatives!

Wide reach and high visibility

Nature Communications make high impact science open to all. Our editors select for external review those papers that make an impact on their respective fields, and studies show that open access articles are viewed more and benefit from a significant citation advantage compared to subscription titles

Our website receives over 2.5 million views a month, providing high visibility to a cross-discipline audience. In 2018 Nature Communications articles were highlighted over 78,000 times by global leading news outlets and received over 416,000 mentions across social media

Our articles are indexed in Web of Science, PubMed, PubMed Central, Scopus, DOAJ, Google Scholar and SAO/NASA ADS.

Each month our editors highlight new articles they see as particularly interesting or important to share with our readership. Nature Communications publishes special editorially collated collections showcasing the most recent research advances within specific fields and papers regularly feature in wider joint Nature Research journal collections.

Submit your paper with Nature Communications here.