On June 30, 2021, Communications Medicine published its first article. What began as a bold vision - to create an open-access journal that bridges translational, clinical, and public health research - has since grown into a global platform for high-quality research that advances our understanding, prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases. As we celebrate our fourth anniversary, we take this moment to look back on the journey and envision the path forward.
First and foremost, we’d like to extend our deepest gratitude to our authors, reviewers, Editorial Board members and readers. Your expertise and support have been instrumental in shaping the journal and fostering our community.
From day one, Communications Medicine has aimed to be selective, yet welcoming and supportive of high-quality research with potential. We uphold the rigorous standards typical of Nature Portfolio while encouraging interdisciplinary collaborations and championing diverse voices. We’re committed to offering a home to both direct submissions and within-Nature Portfolio transfers to interested authors. In just four years, we have published more than 900 papers from authors across 55 countries.
Being inclusive goes beyond the research we publish. Our editorial team has grown to include seven in-house editors and 66 Editorial Board members from around the world. We are also proud to support the next generation of scientists through our Early Career Researcher (ECR) co-review pilot, by encouraging experienced reviewers to involve ECRs in the peer review process and ensuring ECRs are acknowledged for their contributions.
Over the past four years, we’ve also learned a lot from listening to our community’s feedback. We continue to optimize our editorial workflows and improve how we communicate, to support our authors and reviewers throughout the publication process and better serve our community.
Looking into the future, we will continue to expand our reach, build new partnerships, support medicine and human health beyond prestige and metrics, and publish research that matters to you and your community. We will stay true to our core value by championing research that reaches beyond its boundaries.
To our authors, reviewers, Editorial Board members and readers, we warmly invite you to continue shaping the future of Communications Medicine. Submit your best work, engage with our content, and help us build a shared space for a global community to move medicine forward.
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Celebrating four years of Communications Medicine. Commun Med 5, 355 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43856-025-01060-w
Published:
Version of record:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43856-025-01060-w
