Nature Communications

• 1. Introduction

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  Nature Communications launched in 2010 with a mission that set it apart from the moment it first published: any branch of the natural sciences was welcome. Physics and chemistry shared the same pages as medicine, earth sciences, and biology. No single discipline owned it. The journal was built as a peer-reviewed, open-access publication under Nature Portfolio, with editorial offices spread across London, Berlin, New York City, and Shanghai. What does it mean for science when a journal refuses to fence itself into one field? And how did a publication that initially kept some of its content behind a paywall become fully open to the world? Those are the questions this story will answer.

• 2. The Editors Who Shaped It

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  Lesley Anson was the journal's founding editor-in-chief, the person who oversaw its earliest years and set its editorial character. She was followed in turn by Joerg Heber, then Magdalena Skipper, and then Elisa De Ranieri. Each transition carried the publication through a different phase of its growth. Today the editorial structure runs along disciplinary lines. Nathalie Le Bot oversees health and clinical sciences. Stephane Larochelle handles biological sciences. Enda Bergin covers chemistry and biotechnology. Prabhjot Saini is responsible for physics and earth sciences. That four-part division reflects the same broad scope the journal was founded on, translated into a working editorial organization.

• 3. From Paywall to Open Access

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  Starting in October 2014, the journal shifted its submission policy: it would only accept papers from authors willing to pay an article processing charge. The logic behind that fee is central to the open-access model, where the cost of publishing moves from readers to authors or their institutions. Even so, not everything changed at once. Through the end of 2015, some published work remained accessible only to subscribers. Then, in January 2016, all content became freely available to anyone with an internet connection. The preprint dimension came next. From 2017 onward, the journal offered authors a deposition service for preprints of articles that were still under consideration, giving researchers a way to share their findings publicly before formal peer review concluded.

• 4. Impact and Recognition

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  According to the Journal Citation Reports, Nature Communications carried a 2024 impact factor of 15.7. That figure is a standard measure of how frequently articles in a journal are cited by other researchers in a given year. A score in that range places it among the more heavily cited multidisciplinary journals in the natural sciences. The journal is abstracted and indexed across multiple major databases, which broadens its visibility to researchers searching across fields. That indexing coverage matters because a paper that cannot be found through standard searches is a paper that does not get read, cited, or built upon.

• 5. The Communications Family

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  In 2017, Nature Portfolio announced the creation of three journals operating under the Communications brand: Communications Biology, Communications Chemistry, and Communications Physics. The expansion did not stop there. Communications Materials and Communications Earth & Environment both arrived in 2020. Communications Medicine followed in 2021. Communications Engineering and Communications Psychology both launched in 2022. Each of these open-access journals carries a lower publication fee than Nature Communications, reflecting their more focused, specialist scope. A manuscript rejected by a Nature Publishing Group journal can be transferred automatically to one of the Communications-branded journals, with the reviewers' reports traveling along with it. Authors who prefer a clean slate can instead request a fresh review at the receiving journal.