Tag Archives: Communications journals

A new editorial community

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This is the third of three guest blogs we’re featuring from the chief editors of three newly-launched journals: Communications Biology, Communications Chemistry and Communications Physics. (Read the announcement from Nature Research here).

This blog comes from Elena Belsole, the Chief Editor of Communications Physics. Elena was previously Executive Editor for the Open Access journal New Journal of Physics. She has a passion for physics and physics-related science. Elena holds a PhD in Astrophysics and Space Sciences from Paris VI and she carried out postdoctoral research at Bristol and Cambridge Universities.

Communications Physics is a Nature Research journal, joining a portfolio well-known for providing high-quality peer review, managed by full-time, professional editors. Communications Physics – and our sister journals Communications Chemistry and Communications Biology – will maintain the same standards of excellence expected from a Nature Research journal by having a dedicated team of in-house editors.

Elena Belsole

Elena Belsole

But with these new journals we will go a step further and experiment with involving an editorial board made up of practicing academics that are recognised in their field.

Combined expertise, at your service

Professional editors at Communication Physics have a background in research and have the same passion for learning and advancing science that academics do. They provide the scientific and editorial experience and help ensure that quality standards are met across all content published in the journal.

Editorial board members will provide the in-depth expertise in their field of research and will allow us to cover the breadth and variety of physics required – something that we are committed to promote in Communications Physics. They will also bring on-the-ground insights into their field of research. Most importantly, Editorial board members will share the same passion of in-house editors to serve the community by assessing, selecting and helping to improve the papers that the journal publishes. They will also be able to engage with the community in a different way to professional editors, and act as ambassadors for the journal to an extent that internal editors can’t, including reaching out to the community in their geographical areas.

Reaching out to the community

When I started as an editor I was not expecting to learn so much more about physics beyond my domain of studies and research. This is still the most exciting aspect of my job as an editor. By involving external editors we wish not only to provide the journal with more in depth expertise for the benefit of authors and readers, but also to afford the opportunity to the academic community to be involved in editorial practices and standards. Being an editorial board member is a great opportunity to learn how a Nature Research journal works from the inside and communicate that to the community at large. It can also be a rewarding experience, particularly for early-career researchers.

In this respect I see this shared editorial model as a mutual effort to learn from each other and to provide our authors and readers with an enhanced experience. Together we will form a team of experts to achieve excellence in both physics communications advice and the editorial experience.

Get involved

We are looking for active researchers to join our editorial boards. Both an in-depth knowledge of your field a curiosity beyond it are key (see our previous blog on interdisciplinarity from the editor of Communications Biology). Also, editorial board members should have an interest in editorial involvement and be able to articulate the difference between an incremental result and a significant advance in a specific area of research.

If this sounds like you, please get in touch – you may just be our next editorial board member. We will always welcome input from the communities that our Communications journals aspire to serve.

For queries about the journal, please contact commsphys@nature.com

For news from our new Communications journals, follow us on Twitter: @commsbio, @commchem, @commsphys.

Bridging the sub-discipline gaps at Communications Biology

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This is the second of three guest blogs we’re featuring from the chief editors of three newly-launched journals: Communications Biology, Communications Chemistry and Communications Physics. (Read the announcement from Nature Research here).

This post comes from Brooke LaFlamme, the Chief Editor of Communications Biology. Brooke was previously a Senior Editor at Nature Genetics, and holds a PhD in Genetics from Cornell University.

What label do you put on your own research? Is it biology, physics, chemistry? Or something more specific, like genetics or evolutionary biology?

Brooke LaFlamme

Brooke LaFlamme

For many research papers, it can be difficult to choose only one key subject area. As research becomes increasingly collaborative and complex, it often bridges multiple areas, such as cell biology, genetics, physiology and medicine, all within a single study.

Even for research that may be of interest mainly to specialists, it can be difficult to define a single group of specialists—your readers—who will find the results useful for their own research. This can complicate the process of finding the right journal for your work. Journals with a broad scope—such as Nature Communications and now Communications Biology from Nature Research—can be an excellent choice for research that blurs the lines between sub-disciplines.

Calling all biologists

Communications Biology is a forum for research in any area of biology, regardless of sub-discipline.

Of particular importance to me as Chief Editor, I hope that Communications Biology will become a home for research that doesn’t fall neatly into a specific category or specialist journal. As a graduate student, I often found it difficult to identify the right label for my own research. This would happen, for example, when trying to choose from a drop-down menu of categories when submitting a poster or oral presentation abstract for a conference.

Choosing the right journal—with the right readership—can lead to a similar quandary, particularly for papers that editors may consider too specialized for publication in higher impact multidisciplinary journals.

Because I’m a biologist I have focused on biology in this post, but I know this concept also applies to other scientific disciplines. The goal of bridging sub-disciplines is equally important to the two other Communications journals: Communications Chemistry and Communications Physics. Together with Communications Biology, these three journals will provide opportunities for a full spectrum of natural sciences research to be published.

Interdisciplinary at every level

Although I’ve highlighted the increasing complexity of research (in part tied to an increase in interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary work), ‘interdisciplinary’ doesn’t automatically mean bulging, complex papers. It does mean applying the right tools from any research field to answer the question at hand.Communications Biology doesn’t require paradigm shifts. We only require new biological insight to a problem of importance to other biologists—working closely on a similar question or further afield.

Collaboration in interdisciplinary research doesn’t stop at publication. Reaching a broad audience with readers who may think of themselves as being part of a different area of biology, but who relate to your study, can lead to new ideas in another field or to future research collaborations.

Finally, I know that researchers looking to publish in a broad-scope, open-access biology journal have many options. With Communications Biology, my editorial team and I aim to deliver the best author service possible, drawing on the collective experience and expertise of the entire Nature Research family. We are also committed to the Nature Research goals of promoting transparency and reproducibility in research and to providing a fair and timely review process. We hope you will think of Communications Biology for your next paper.

You can submit an article to Communications Biology here.

For queries about the journal, please contact commsbio@nature.com

For news from our new Communications journals, follow us on Twitter: @commsbio, @commchem, @commsphys.

Introducing the new Communications journals

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– And why you could consider Communications Chemistry for your next paper

This is the first of three guest blogs we’re featuring from the chief editors of three newly-launched journals: Communications Biology, Communications Chemistry and Communications Physics. (Read the announcement from Nature Research here).

This blog comes from Luke Batchelor, the Chief Editor of Communications Chemistry. Previously, Luke was a Team Manager at Nature Communications. He holds a PhD in Chemistry from The University of Manchester, and performed post-doctoral work at Université Paris Sud XI.

Luke Batchelor

Luke Batchelor

A common complaint amongst scientists that I speak to is that there is simply too much literature to keep on top of, and so as we announce three new community-focused open-access journals I think it is important to talk about what we intend to achieve at Communications Chemistry and to explain the benefits we hope to provide for our authors and readers.

While this post focuses on chemistry, the teams developing the three journals have been working closely together and many of these sentiments are equally applicable to the sister journals – Communications Biology and Communications Physics.

Scope

Communications Chemistry will be a selective journal, publishing what we hope will be significant advances within any area of chemistry. And while the journal itself will cover a broad scope, we would not require that an individual paper is of broad interest. We will be happy to publish interesting work that may only be of relevance to smaller groups of researchers that target specific problems.

Speed

We are aware of the importance of rapid dissemination of new work, particularly in highly competitive fields. As such, if your work is not accepted for publication in another Nature Research journal (Nature Communications, for example) we will be making the process of transferring your manuscript and any associated reviewers reports to Communications Chemistry as efficient as possible.

While our peer-review process will be as rigorous as any other Nature Research journal, and we will be adhering to all of the same publishing and ethical policies, our editors and staff are committed to streamlining the peer-review and publication process at every step.

Visibility

As an open-access journal, publishing under the unrestrictive CC-BY licence, your work will be available to be widely shared and read by anyone. The journal will be hosted alongside the rest of Nature Research’s portfolio link on nature.com, which attracts over nine million unique visitors per month.

Community Engagement

We see ourselves as a journal for the chemistry community, and as such we will be striving to work closely with the researchers that make up our authors and readership. In part this will be through our shared editorial model, which combines the editorial experience of in-house editors with the technical expertise and day-to-day research involvement of practising scientists. Our editors will make themselves available at conferences, lab visits and via social media to discuss individual papers or publishing in more general terms, and we are looking at initiatives which we hope will allow us to give back to the community in other ways.

Call for papers

Communications Chemistry is now open for submissions. I invite you to visit our website for more information.

My editors and I also look forward to working with you if you choose to publish your research with Communications Chemistry.

For queries about the journal, please contact commschem@nature.com.

For news from our new Communications journals, follow us on Twitter: @commsbio, @commchem, @commsphys.