Nature Communications


Nature Communications is a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal published by Nature Research since 2010. It covers the natural sciences, including physics, chemistry, earth sciences, medicine, and biology.
The founding editor-in-chief was Lesley Anson, followed by Joerg Heber, Magdalena Skipper, and Elisa De Ranieri. The journal has editorial offices in London, Berlin, New York City, and Shanghai.
Starting October 2014, the journal only accepted submissions from authors willing to pay an article processing charge. Until the end of 2015, part of the published submissions were only available to subscribers. In January 2016, all content became freely accessible.

Abstracting and indexing

The journal is abstracted and indexed in:
According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2019 impact factor of 12.121.

Editorial process and journal scope

Nature Communications is a multi-disciplinary online-only journal which publishes articles from all fields of natural sciences. Part of its scope is to fill a gap for high-quality, cross-disciplinary research articles with no dedicated Nature-branded journal available. The editor-in-chief is supported by 13 different editorial teams covering individual topics.

Subjournals

In 2017, Nature Publishing Group announced the creation of three "subjournals" under the Communications brand: Communications Biology, Communications Chemistry and Communications Physics. In 2019, Communications Materials was announced.
These open-access journals offer a lower publication fee than Nature Communications, reflecting their more specialist remits. Manuscripts rejected by Nature Publishing Group journals can choose to transfer the manuscript together with reviewers' reports to the three Communications-branded journals via an automated transfer service. Alternatively, authors may choose to request a fresh review.