Last week Communications Chemistry published its first content, although I have been working as Chief Editor since June 2017. Having developed the journal with our publisher, alongside the Chief Editors of Communications Biology and Communications Physics, I have a good idea of what we think a Communications Chemistry Article should look like. At the same time I appreciate that we are a brand new journal and there are probably still lots of people with questions out there.

If you read any of our literature you will see that we are "an open access, multidisciplinary chemistry journal from Nature Research publishing articles, reviews and commentary across the chemical sciences" but what does that really mean? We recently published an Editorial which elaborates on the journal ethos and which you can read here. Put simply, we hope to provide the standards and services for authors, reviewers and readers that one would expect from any Nature Research publication, despite our differing scope. We don't necessarily apply the same stringent criteria for impact and significance as the Nature-branded journals, including Nature Communications, but we do hope that the author experience with the journal should not be noticeably different. Regardless of whether a manuscript is handled by an in-house editor or an Editorial Board Member we aim to make all of our decisions as fairly and efficiently as possible, and to communicate them clearly. We also adhere to all the Nature Research ethical and publication policies.

Please visit our website to view our first articles which are of course, and will always be, free to read. Some of them are also accompanied by 'Behind the paper' pieces contributed by the authors, for example "Classifying Activation Energies in Heterogeneous Catalysis". We have more content scheduled for next week, and will be publishing  articles fortnightly until we move to a publish-when-ready model later in the year. If you have any questions we are always happy to talk about the journal. Our contact details are all published on the website, we have Editorial Board Members on three continents, and in the next month we will have editors attending the ACS Spring Meeting in New Orleans (USA) and the Girona Seminar in Girona (Spain) so please do come and say hi.