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This year marks a quarter of a century since the birth of photonic crystals. Overcoming early difficulties, the field has made a range of technological developments possible as well as the emergence of new science at the interface between condensed-matter physics and photonics.
As the old 'publish or perish' adage is brought into question, additional research-impact indices, known as altmetrics, are offering new evaluation alternatives. But such metrics may need to adjust to the evolution of science publishing.
On the tenth anniversary of the launch of Nature Materials, we look back at how authors, reviewers and editors have contributed to the journal by evaluating data such as decision types and times, and the geographical share of submitted and published manuscripts.
Highly engineered materials can play a pivotal role both in boosting the performance of athletes and in stimulating the innate repair of tissue damaged by sports injuries.
François Hollande, the new French president, has an opportunity to correct and consolidate five years of frantic research reforms under Nicolas Sarkozy.
The next European Union funding scheme, which is pending European Council and Parliament approval by summer 2013, will be dedicated to both research and innovation.
Open-access journals are publishing at a pace that is not much faster than some recently launched subscription-based journals. The swiftest and surest route to full open-access publishing is then for funders, institutions and publishers to agree on the conditions for self-archiving in publicly accessible repositories.
To ensure that their work gets the funding and the attention it deserves, scientists need to engage with different stakeholders. Concepts from marketing could help them increase the impact of their efforts.
Progress in photovoltaic technology could soon mean grid parity for solar electricity. In this issue we highlight scientific as well as science-policy strategies aimed towards achieving this goal.
Oxide materials show an amazing variety of electronic and ionic phenomena. However, despite considerable advances in understanding and utilizing these effects, experimental and theoretical challenges still need to be addressed before the promised applications can be realized.
