Nature Publishing Group cements leadership in multidisciplinary sciences, expands interdisciplinary publishing
24 June 2015
Building on its established leadership in multidisciplinary publishing, Nature Publishing Group’s (NPG) open access and
interdisciplinary journal publishing programs are flourishing. The publisher says that open access, interdisciplinary and
multidisciplinary research are all essential to accelerate progress, aid collaboration and meet the needs of the research
community.
For the second year running, three NPG titles dominate the multidisciplinary science category of the Thomson Reuters 2014
Journal Citation Report*, with Nature, Nature Communications and Scientific Reports ranking first, third and fifth respectively.
Nature Communications also appears in the overall top 150 journals for the first time.
Steven Inchcoombe, Chief Executive of Nature Publishing Group said: "We aim to support the advance of science and to serve
the needs of scientists. We are especially pleased with our strong showing in the multidisciplinary sciences category in the 2014
Journal Citation Report, and also of the phenomenal success of our fast-growing open access portfolio. Both particularly benefit
inter-disciplinary research, which we and many others believe will be of increasing importance to furthering our understanding
and successfully dealing with some of the important global challenges we face, such as sustainability of the earth’s resources with a growing population."
"We have strong journals that can play their part in helping researchers solve these challenges, thanks to our outstanding
editorial teams and standards, and the exceptional authors, referees and editors that we are privileged to work with,"
Inchcoombe continued.
Journal Impact Factors indicate citation impact at a journal level, and are calculated from citations of papers published between
2012-13. NPG titles perform well across the board, with 16 Nature-branded titles occupying the top spot in their categories, and Nature remaining the world's most cited scientific journal with 617,363 citations in 2014. Nature also leads the multidisciplinary sciences category for the eighth consecutive year, with an impact factor of 41.456. The interdisciplinary Nature Climate Change now has an IF of 14.547, and NPG has announced its plan to launch Nature Energy in 2016.
Impact Factors are useful broad measures of average journal citation rates in comparison to others in their subject field, but they have their limitations and other metrics are also important. NPG journals also perform well when using these alternative metrics. For example Altmetric** measures the general and social media activity around research papers. Articles from journals
published by NPG accounted for nearly a quarter of the Altmetric** Top 100 of 2014, with 24 articles making the list. Over 10 million visitors now regularly access nature.com each month, up over 20% over the last 2 years, further demonstrating the value of NPG’s content to the scientific community.
"Six months ago, we introduced our content sharing initiative to enable subscribers and media outlets to share scientific
research," continues Inchcoombe. "Since then we have seen over 250,000 full text accesses of articles shared by individual
subscribers or media outlets. We hope that this will facilitate collaboration further between disciplines."
While maintaining its focus on outstanding research, NPG has been rapidly expanding its open access options for authors with
encouragement from most of the world's science funders. In 2014 44% of the research published by NPG was published open
access and in 2015 this has now grown to exceed 50%. NPG is the first major publisher to pass this milestone and is committed to expanding its open science options to better meet scientists' needs.
Nature Communications, the world's leading multi-disciplinary Open Access journal now has an Impact Factor of 11.470, up
from 10.742 in 2014, with 26,346 citations in 2012/13. It is now counted among the 150 top-cited journals in the world. Last
year, a statistical analysis of the articles published in Nature Communications, carried out by the Research Information
Network (RIN) found that open access articles are viewed three times more often than articles that are only available to
subscribers. RIN also found that OA articles are cited more than subscription articles.
Scientific Reports, NPG's fastest growing open access journal which publishes original research that is technically sound and
scientifically valid, achieved an IF of 5.578 up from 5.078 and is now ranked as one of the top-cited 500 journals in the world for
the first time.
In addition, Light: Science & Applications, an open access journal published in China by NPG, received its second IF of 14.603.
This meant that the journal climbed from #4 to #2 in the optics category – second only to Nature Photonics.
-ENDS-
Notes to Editors
*Data is taken from the 2014 Journal Citation Report, Science Edition (Thomson Reuters, 2015.)
**Altmetric is supported by Digital Science, which is also a Holtzbrinck investment.
Updated on 30 June 2015: This press release previously stated that Nature leads the multidisciplinary sciences category for the
seventh consecutive year. It is now corrected to eighth consecutive year.
