Nature Publishing Group (NPG) has announced five new co-publishing agreements for 2009 in Japan and China. NPG Nature Asia-Pacific, the Asia-Pacific wing of NPG, has partnered in China with the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, to co-publish Acta Pharmacologica Sinica and the Asian Journal of Andrology (which is also sponsored by Shanghai Jiao Tong University) from January 2009. Together with an existing publishing partnership for the journal Cell Research with the Shanghai Institute for Biological Sciences, this means that from next year NPG will publish three of mainland China’s most prestigious journals in life sciences and chemistry.

In Japan, NPG Nature Asia-Pacific has finalised agreements with the Japan Antibiotics Research Association, the Japan Society for Human Genetics and the Japan Society of Hypertension to publish the Journal of Antibiotics, the Journal of Human Genetics and Hypertension Research.

David Swinbanks, of NPG Nature Asia-Pacific, said: “By building on the reputations of these five international journals and by launching the NPG Asia Materials website we can publish and highlight some of the best research from the region in the life, medical, chemical and physical sciences and communicate it to the relevant communities around the world.” NPG Nature Asia-Pacific is the Asia-Pacific wing of NPG, set up to serve the growing needs of the scientific, engineering and medical communities in the region, and has offices in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Delhi and Melbourne. More about its publishing partnerships can be found here.