Журнал Nature: История и современность престижного научного издания.

British scientific journal

Nature is a British weekly scientific journal founded and based in London, England. As a multidisciplinary publication, Nature features peer reviewed research from a variety of academic disciplines, mainly in science and technology. It has core editorial offices across the United States, continental Europe, and Asia under the international scientific publishing company Springer Nature. Nature was one of the world's most cited scientific journals by the Science Edition of the 2022 Journal Citation Reports (with an ascribed impact factor of 64.8), making it one of the world's most read and most prestigious academic journals. as of 2012, it claimed an online readership of about three million unique readers per month. In 2007, Nature (together with Science) received the Prince of Asturias Award for Communications and Humanity. Nature mostly publishes research articles. Spotlight articles are not research papers but mostly news or magazine style papers and hence do not count towards impact factor nor receive similar recognition as research articles. Some spotlight articles are also paid by partners or sponsors.

The huge progress in science and mathematics during the 19th century was recorded in journals written mostly in German or French, as well as in English. Britain underwent enormous technological and industrial changes and advances particularly in the latter half of the 19th century. The most respected scientific journals of this time were the refereed journals of the Royal Society, which had published many of the great works from Isaac Newton and Michael Faraday to Charles Darwin. In addition, the number of popular science periodicals doubled from the 1850s to the 1860s. According to the editors of these popular science magazines, the publications were designed to serve as "organs of science", in essence, a means of connecting the public to the scientific world. which, created in 1859, began as a natural history magazine and progressed to include more physical observational science and technical subjects and less natural history. The journal's name changed from its original title to Intellectual Observer: A Review of Natural History, Microscopic Research, and Recreative Science and then to the Student and Intellectual Observer of Science, Literature, and Art. While Recreative Science had attempted to include more physical sciences such as astronomy and archaeology, the Intellectual Observer broadened itself further to include literature and art as well. which covered different fields of science by creating subsections titled "Scientific Summary" or "Quarterly Retrospect", with book reviews and commentary on the latest scientific works and publications. taking its name from a line by William Wordsworth: "To the solid ground of nature trusts the Mind that builds for aye". First owned and published by Alexander Macmillan, Nature was similar to its predecessors in its attempt to "provide cultivated readers with an accessible forum for reading about advances in scientific knowledge." Perhaps it was in part its scientific liberality that made Nature a longer lasting success than its predecessors. John Maddox, editor of Nature from 1966 to 1973 and from 1980 to 1995, suggested at a celebratory dinner for the journal's centennial edition that perhaps it was the journalistic qualities of Nature that drew readers in; "journalism" Maddox states, "is a way of creating a sense of community among people who would otherwise be isolated from each other. This is what Lockyer's journal did from the start." In addition, Maddox mentions that the financial backing of the journal in its first years by the Macmillan family also allowed the journal to flourish and develop more freely than scientific journals before it. Gregory helped to establish Nature in the international scientific community. His obituary by the Royal Society stated: "Gregory was always very interested in the international contacts of science, and in the columns of Nature he always gave generous space to accounts of the activities of the International Scientific Unions." During the years 1945 to 1973, editorship of Nature changed three times, first in 1945 to A. J. V. Gale and L. J. F. Brimble (who in 1958 became the sole editor), then to John Maddox in 1965, and finally to David Davies in 1973. Starting in the 1980s, the journal underwent a great deal of expansion, launching over ten new journals. These new journals comprise Nature Research, which was created in 1999 under the name Nature Publishing Group and includes Nature, Nature Research Journals, Stockton Press Specialist Journals and Macmillan Reference (renamed NPG Reference). In 1996, Nature created its own website and in 1999 Nature Publishing Group began its series of Nature Reviews. On 30 October 2008, Nature endorsed an American presidential candidate for the first time when it supported Barack Obama during his campaign in America's 2008 presidential election. In October 2012, an Arabic edition of the magazine was launched in partnership with King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology. As of the time it was released, it had about 10,000 subscribers. On 2 December 2014, Nature announced that it would allow its subscribers and a group of selected media outlets to share links allowing free, "read only" access to content from its journals. These articles are presented using the digital rights management system ReadCube (which is funded by the Macmillan subsidiary Digital Science), and does not allow readers to download, copy, print, or otherwise distribute the content. While it does, to an extent, provide free online access to articles, it is not a true open access scheme due to its restrictions on re use and distribution. On 15 January 2015, details of a proposed merger with Springer Science+Business Media were announced. In May 2015 it came under the umbrella of Springer Nature, by the merger of Springer Science+Business Media and Holtzbrinck Publishing Group's Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan, and Macmillan Education. Since 2011, the journal has published Nature's 10 "people who mattered" during the year, as part of their annual review.

A paper was published with important figure anomalies from an author with a past of publishing figure anomalies. A 2013 fraudulent paper was also published in Nature. From 2000 to 2001, a series of five fraudulent papers by Jan Hendrik Schön was published in Nature. The papers, about semiconductors, were revealed to contain falsified data and other scientific fraud. In 2003, Nature retracted the papers. The Schön scandal was not limited to Nature; other prominent journals, such as Science and Physical Review, also retracted papers by Schön. In 2022, an editorial published in Nature entitled "How Nature contributed to science's discriminatory legacy" mentioning the problematics of some of their articles: "But we have also published material that contributed to bias, exclusion and discrimination in research and society."

In 1999, Nature began publishing science fiction short stories. The brief "vignettes" are printed in a series called "Futures". The stories appeared in 1999 and 2000, again in 2005 and 2006, and have appeared weekly since July 2007. Sister publication Nature Physics also printed stories in 2007 and 2008. In 2005, Nature was awarded the European Science Fiction Society's Best Publisher award for the "Futures" series. One hundred of the Nature stories between 1999 and 2006 were published as the collection Futures from Nature in 2008. Another collection, Futures from Nature 2, was published in 2014.

Nature is edited and published in the United Kingdom by a division of the international scientific publishing company Springer Nature that publishes academic journals, magazines, online databases, and services in science and medicine. Nature has offices in London, New York City, San Francisco, Washington, D. C., Boston, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Paris, Munich, and Basingstoke. Nature Portfolio also publishes other specialized journals including Nature Neuroscience, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Methods, the Nature Clinical Practice series of journals, Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, Nature Chemistry, and the Nature Reviews series of journals. Since 2005, each issue of Nature has been accompanied by a Nature Podcast featuring highlights from the issue and interviews with the articles' authors and the journalists covering the research. It is presented by Kerri Smith and features interviews with scientists on the latest research, as well as news reports from Nature's editors and journalists. The Nature Podcast was founded – and the first 100 episodes were produced and presented – by clinician and virologist Chris Smith of Cambridge and The Naked Scientists. Nature Portfolio actively supports the self archiving process and in 2002 was one of the first publishers to allow authors to post their contributions on their personal websites, by requesting an exclusive licence to publish, rather than requiring authors to transfer copyright. In December 2007, Nature Publishing Group introduced the Creative Commons attribution non commercial share alike unported licence for those articles in Nature journals that are publishing the primary sequence of an organism's genome for the first time. In 2008, a collection of articles from Nature was edited by John S. Partington under the title H. G. Wells in Nature, 1893–1946: A Reception Reader and published by Peter Lang.