We are delighted to introduce you to Communications Engineering, the first journal in the Nature Portfolio with a broad multidisciplinary engineering focus.  The journal is the next in the Communications series, a group of editorially selective and fully open access journals dedicated to publishing high quality research, reviews and comment pieces in a specialized area of interest.   

From nanostructure to infrastructure, Communications Engineering seeks to publish research papers reporting a valuable advance in the engineering of any physical system, supported by demonstrations of exciting new technological opportunity, capability or benefit as a result of that advancement.  We will also consider papers which provide important new knowledge or insight specifically acquired to inform an engineering community.

Our content will reflect key current themes in engineering research.  For example, the goal of global sustainability has created a vast range of interesting engineering challenges which we are keen to explore in our online pages.  We will also investigate the technology pushes that continue to gain traction in diverse fields, such as additive manufacturing, artificial intelligence and nanotechnology.   And we will report on how engineers are redefining the limits of capability of tools and instruments for the laboratory and in the field.

Our broad multidisciplinary scope supports the engineering community in a variety of ways:

1. We can publish engineering research without concern about disciplinary siloes.
2. We can showcase how various engineering communities offer different approaches towards solutions to the UN sustainable development goals.
3. We can explore engineering research in fields not yet well represented in the Nature Portfolio, such as civil, mechanical, chemical and environmental engineering.
4. We can also support fields already represented by the current Nature journals, such as biomedical, energy and electronic engineering. We can do this by offering a home for papers covering a wider range of technology readiness levels and with less of a demand for fundamental insight.
5. We can offer a platform for discovery to show all the ways in which engineering research can be creative, relevant and exciting, to inspire the next generation of researchers.

Through the power of open access all our publications can be read by everyone interested in the latest engineering research.  And we are happy to share that as Communications Engineering is a new journal at Springer Nature, we offer reduced article processing fees for authors in our early years.  Please see here for more details.

As with the other Communications journals we have a hybrid editorial model consisting of a professional in-house editorial team, and an external editorial board.  Our in-house editors are the heart and soul of the journal, working full time on creating and developing content ideas and propelling our journal submissions forward.  Meanwhile our diverse editorial board offers disciplinary expertise and insight for their respective communities.  Both internal and external editors handle manuscripts in a collaborative manner, making decisions on the suitability of submissions for the journal and overseeing peer review.  The aim is for editorial consistency in our decisions and high quality in our publication output.  Our external board is in a growth phase.  We currently have 16 members crossing a variety of engineering disciplines. 

We are excited to build a journal that can support and inspire our engineering research communities in the development of new concepts and innovations and their translation to application and use in the real world.  We look forward to working with you on your manuscript soon. 

If you have any questions about the journal, please post them in the comments and we will endeavour to answer them.