There is an entertaining rumour going around about the journal Nature Communications . When I heard it for the fourth or fifth time, I decided to check out whether there is any truth in it. Sometimes it is put another way: cell biology papers drag down the impact factor of Nature Communications , or that they don’t deserve the high JIF tag of the journal because they are cited at lower rates. Could this be true?

There have been several posts on this site about publication lag times. You can read them here. Lag times are the delays in the dissemination of scientific data introduced by the process of publishing the paper in a journal. Nowadays, your paper can be online in a few hours using a preprint server. However, this work is not peer reviewed. Journals organise a formal peer review and provide some sort of certification of the work.

Towards the end of last year I wrote up some initial reactions to the announcement of Nature Communications and the communications team at NPG were kind enough to do a Q&A to look at some of the issues and concerns I raised. Specifically I was concerned about two things.