NEWS

Springer Nature expands open access portfolio
with two new high-quality journals from Nature Research

Communications Materials and Communications Earth & Environment
join Springer Nature’s comprehensive portfolio of around 600 open access journals

Two new high-quality open access (OA) journals have been launched by Springer Nature as part of the Nature Research Communications family. The first articles in Communications Materials were published on 4 February 2020, while the submissions portal for the journal Communications Earth & Environment opens on 12 February 2020. These new journals join the around 600 fully OA journals also published by Springer Nature including Nature Communications and Scientific Reports.

Alison Mitchell, Chief Journals Officer at Springer Nature, said: “We are committed to speeding up the transition to a sustainable and competitive OA market, and these new journals demonstrate our dedication to delivering an open research future, where every element of the research process is instantly available, discoverable, usable, reusable, and widely shareable. By publishing more fully open access journals we offer researchers an increased choice, so that their findings are accessible as early and rapidly as possible. With almost 20 years of experience in OA publishing we know how openness and innovation helps to advance the pace and quality of scientific research and discovery.”

Communications Materials is a selective, broad-scope materials science journal, publishing important research in all areas of materials science, including those at the interface with biology, chemistry and physics. “A particular emphasis of ours is to publish articles that span all technology readiness levels (TRLs)- from the basic behaviour and properties of materials, to their use in real applications and scaling-up,” said John Plummer, Chief Editor of Communications Materials. 

Communications Earth & Environment will publish research that spans all areas of the Earth, planetary and environmental sciences, including those at the interface with ecology, sustainability and environmental social sciences. “With its broad scope, the journal will be uniquely placed to bring together research from a range of Earth science disciplines to tackle the scientific questions at the heart of understanding the past, present and future of our planet and its neighbours in the Solar System” said Heike Langenberg, Chief Editor of Communications Earth & Environment.

The submission and review processes are managed by in-house professional editors, as with all Nature Research journals. In addition, peer review processes are supported by external expert Editorial Board Members.