Professional management is process not product. Management enforces compliance. The spec sheet is arbitrary. The second step is reorganization, the third is merger. Do studies.

Know where you are. Identify a goal. Navigate a path. Allow for modest FUBAR in route. Birthing a good future is always bloody, but do not let slop rise above your ankles. Evolve.

In some ways it might be straightforward. The most logical would be to have 2 old well-established editors for the synthetic and physical side. And pick 2 younger editors to cover the materials and biological side.

Of course you can't forget to include a section for a young intrepid freelance chemical blogger. :p

Mitch

Hi Mitch - your comment raises an interesting point that we've been wondering about. Since there is already a Nature Materials and Nature Chemical Biology, what papers should be published as materials research in Nature Chemistry vs. as chemistry work in Nature Materials (and similarly for chemical biology vs. biological chemistry)? Any thoughts?

I guess, since Nature Chemical Biology exists already, that should prelude those types of papers from entering Nature Chemistry. Just on the grounds of overlap and having to deal with one less editor specialty.

Nature Materials is already very broad and not all papers have that much Chemisty in it anyways. So, I would say materials chemistry is still fair game for Nature Chemistry.

Although, if a materials paper is submitted to Nature Chemistry and is not chemically oriented enough for that journal, I think the authors should still be able to get to keep their submission date and try for Nature Materials.

Mitch

Hey Mitch - interesting ideas - thanks. In regards to your last point, I'm not sure that everyone appreciates that the NPG family journals are all completely independent. Having a paper keep it's submission date between Nature Chemistry and Nature Materials would be the same as, for example, keeping the submission date generated at JACS when the paper was published at Angew. Chemie. (whether that would be desireable/possible is, of course, a completely different topic!) The NPG folks do try to keep things simple by allowing authors to transfer manuscripts between journals without having to re-enter all the author names and upload all the pieces again, etc., but that's just for the sake of convenience.

In the meantime, I'll suggest that you (Stuart) just need one, very hard-working physical organic bioinorganic atmospheric environmental ecological chemist, and your staff will be complete. :) Oops - except you'll also need an analytical chemist.