From the April issue of Nature Geoscience (2, 229; 2009):

Until now, the online submission system for Nature Geoscience has allowed prospective authors to contact the editors formally with a ‘presubmission enquiry’, consisting of an abstract and a brief cover letter. A small fraction of our authors have taken up this option, which promises a fast evaluation of the suitability in principle of a piece of research for publication in Nature Geoscience. We are now closing down this option.

Presubmission enquiries are useful in fields where the interest of a manuscript is readily apparent from a brief summary. We have found that in the geosciences, such a shortcut assessment is almost always impossible: the novelty and importance of a study usually relies on factors that can only be fully appreciated by reading the whole paper and often previous publications in the field.

We would hate to miss an interesting paper because of a badly written abstract. In response to a large proportion of presubmission enquiries we have therefore simply asked to see the full manuscript. Furthermore, we have always carefully considered full submissions of manuscripts that had previously received a discouraging response on a presubmission enquiry.

We feel that our authors are best served by a careful assessment of the suitability of their paper, based on all the necessary information, therefore we now encourage authors to submit their full manuscripts right away. Of course, for any brief and informal enquiries — regarding a manuscript submission or anything else — we can always be contacted at geoscience@nature.com.

The other Nature journals’ presubmission enquiry service is described at the author and referees’ website:

Presubmission enquiries :

Researchers may obtain informal feedback from editors before submitting the whole paper. This service is intended to save you time — if the editors feel it would not be suitable, you can submit the manuscript to another journal without delay. If you wish to use the presubmission enquiry service, please use the online system of the journal of your choice to send a paragraph explaining the importance of your paper, as well as the abstract or summary paragraph with its associated citation list so the editors may judge the paper in relation to other related work. The editors will quickly either invite you to submit the whole manuscript (which does not mean any commitment to publication), or will say that it is not suitable for the journal. If you receive a negative response, please do not reply. If you are convinced of the importance of your paper despite editors’ reservations, you may submit the whole manuscript using the journal’s online submission system. The editors can then make a more complete assessment of your work.