Nature Communications announced
The Nature Publishing Group (NPG) has just announced a new journal – Nature Communications.
This is apparently an attempt at providing a home for excellent research which is not broad enough to be interesting for the general readership of Nature and at the same time not necessarily covered in a dedicated Nature research journal like Nature Physics or Nature Chemistry. Official examples include high-energy physics. The aims and scope of this newest addition to the NPG empire — whose official abbreviation will be Nat. Comms. — do however state that it will also feature contributions in areas which are already covered by these specialized journals. Confusing, isn’t it?
For me as an experimental physicist working in quantum optics this is quite exciting. The number of Nature journals which potentially cover our field of research has risen from 1 to 4 within just a few years: Nature, Nature Physics (released in October 2005), Nature Photonics (launched in January 2007) and now Nature Communications. The newest journal in this club could potentially attract quantum optics papers which do not necessarily contain exciting new experimental methods and thus ‘hard’ physics but are focused on conceptual questions.
An entirely different question is whether this explosion of top tier journals is a good thing for physics. Clearly, any journal with ‘Nature’ in its name will attract a lot of good papers. While I think it is a great idea to offer interdisciplinary fields a high-profile and high-impact place to publish their research I get the feeling that physics itself is spread out too far across many journals and that this could have an inflationary effect on the respective journals’ impact. Also, Nat. Comms. will for many groups be yet another rung on the ladder which starts with a rejection from Nature and descends into the nether regions of the publishing space. This will stretch the already lengthy period between initial submission of a paper and its publication even further.
Anyway, enough speculation. To see where Nature Communications will really be heading, we’ll have to wait for the first issue, which will be published in April 2010.
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