We still have a few months to go in 2025, a year that’s been quite busy for the Nature Methods team and filled with some big changes.

Team news

We lead off with some updates about the Nature Methods editorial team. Our longtime microscopy and imaging editor, Rita Strack, left the team at the end of July to become the new chief editor of Nature Biomedical Engineering! We miss her a lot, but we are excited for her fantastic opportunity and look forward to seeing how that journal grows and evolves under her leadership. We are interviewing candidates and hope to have a new microscopy and imaging editor join the team before the end of the year.

In mid-September, we welcomed our newest editor, Aparna Anantharaman. With a strong research background in RNA biology, gene regulation and peptide antibiotics, she will be responsible for handling manuscripts in the molecular biology and chemical biology fields. Most recently, Aparna was a managing editor and publisher for the npj series of journals at Springer Nature. Her role at Nature Methods is shared with the Nature Research Cross-Journal team, which means that part of her time will be spent working with other Nature Research journals as workload needs arise.

Involving early-career researchers in peer review

In June, in a project led by Lei Tang, we launched a formal co-reviewing initiative1 with three main goals: to encourage established researchers to train early-career researchers in the peer review process, to ensure that everyone involved in helping peer review a paper receives credit for this activity (for example, by being named as a reviewer on a published paper and/or adding this information to an ORCiD profile), and to grow a more diverse and inclusive pool of reviewers from the next generation of scientists.

While we are still collecting data, the initial few months indicate that this program has been very popular with our reviewers. Most manuscripts we send out for peer review now have at least one early-career researcher working on a co-review, and many manuscripts have multiple early-career researchers involved in the process. We are overjoyed to see great feedback from the research community about this initiative and hope that this helps us achieve our journal goals around improving the transparency, fairness and equity of peer review.

Conferences and outreach

We hope that some of our readers had an opportunity to meet our editors in person at conferences and other events throughout the year! If not, we still have some travel planned for the remainder of 2025, and we look forward to selecting conferences to attend in 2026. We are always happy to consider invitations (in fact, this is how we find out about many new and small conferences that aren’t already on our radar), so don’t hesitate to reach out.

Our editors also have occasion to participate in organizing scientific conferences via the Nature Conferences program. At the end of 2024, Lin Tang was part of the team of Nature Research editors that organized a successful meeting in Beijing on “Human Genetics and Genomics: maximizing power to address complexity and human health.” This month, Arunima Singh will be traveling to Nanjing to help lead the “AI Augmented Biology” conference.

Creature Column

One of our most fun regular features is the Creature Column2. Developed, commissioned and edited by Nina Vogt, this column helps bring attention to unique organisms that are studied in research labs around the world in an easy-to-read yet informative piece. You won’t find fruit flies, zebrafish or mice discussed in this column. Instead, you’ll learn about how microscopic yet adorable tardigrades3 are useful for studying how biological materials survive extreme conditions. You’ll read about how the tiny, transparent Danionella fish4 is an ideal model for studying brain-wide neuronal activity. And you’ll learn why bats5 are important models for understanding how mammalian brains navigate, as well as for understanding how their unique immune systems allow them to host many viruses without developing clinical disease. All of the Creature Columns can now be found in a Collection, which we invite you to peruse.

We have two new easy-to-read yet informative columns in the works for 2026, which we are excited to share with our readers soon!

Special issues

Special issues are a great way to bring more attention to topics that we as editors think are important for our readers. And they are very gratifying for our team to produce!. What sets us apart from other journals is our focus on technology, tools and methods, what they have to offer for life sciences research, and what technical challenges still remain.

To date in 2025 we have published two special issues: one in May on vibrational microscopy methods6 (led by Rita Strack) and one on methods to study cancer7 (led by Madhura Mukhopadhyay), published just last month. We hope you will check out these special issues and the associated Vibrational Microscopy and Cancer Collections.

We will have one more special issue in December 2025, our highly anticipated Method of the Year. What will it be? You’ll have to stay tuned to find out!