All That Matters

There are some exciting news concerning Nature Communications (where I am the Deputy Editor): it has been announced today that in a few weeks, on 20 October 2014, the journal will become fully open access – becoming the first Nature-branded open access journal. What this means is that any manuscript submitted after that date will be published under an open access licence, subject to an article processing charge. Papers published earlier retain their existing licence, and authors of papers under consideration prior to that date will still have a choice between the subscription and open access model. Regardless, from 20 October 2014 onwards the journal will make a transition to become fully open access. More details can be found in the related press release.

The default licence choice for these articles will be Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0. Although other licence types are available upon request for the same article processing charge, the CC-BY licence is the preferred licence type by many funding agencies and supporters of the open access model. It is also the licence under which this blog is published.

All in all, I believe this is a fantastic step for open access publishing, and am really excited to see this transition. Building on the existing success of the journal, it establishes Nature Communications as Nature’s flagship multidisciplinary open access journal!

It has now been more than seven years that I left active research and joined Nature Materials as an editor in March 2005. I still remember my first day as an editor, and one of the very first papers that I handled. A brush made from carbon nanotubes that made it to the Guinness Book of World Records as the smallest brush ever made.

Since then, time just flew by. I learned a lot of new science, published exciting research, and most of all, made many new friends. But for me, the time has come to take up new challenges and to broaden my experience in science publishing even further. I am therefore very happy to be able to announce that I will join Nature Communications in October as the Managing Editor (physical sciences). There I will lead a great team of editors across the entire spectrum of the physical sciences.

Nature Communications is a successful online journal that publishes across all areas of the biological, physical and chemical sciences. In particular its open access option has proved to be very popular. Working further on the development of the journal is a tremendous opportunity that I very much look forward to. The team is expanding rapidly, and if you are working in physics or materials science and are interested in a career as an editor, why not join me at the journal, as there is a job opening.

So thanks for your interest and reading this far on this more personal blog post. It is sad for me to leave Nature Materials after such a long time at the journal, with such great colleagues. At the same time, I hope to see you all again as authors, reviewers and readers at Nature Communications!