Nature Publishing Group announces six new publishing initiatives in the Asia-Pacific region

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is pleased to announce five new co-publishing agreements in Japan and China and the launch of the NPG Asia Materials website with the Tokyo Institute of Technology, one of Japan’s leading universities. NPG Asia Materials is the precursor to a new Asian-based journal devoted to materials research. These developments are a landmark in Nature Publishing Group’s strategy, announced in January 2006, to expand its publishing operations across the Asia-Pacific region.

NPG Nature Asia-Pacific, the Asia-Pacific wing of NPG, has partnered in China with the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences, to co-publish Acta Pharmacologica Sinica and the Asian Journal of Andrology (which is also sponsored by Shanghai Jiao Tong University). Together with an existing publishing partnership for the journal Cell Research with the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, from 2009, NPG will publish three of mainland China’s top ranked journals in life science or chemistry.

In Japan, NPG Nature Asia-Pacific has finalized agreements with the Japan Antibiotics Research Association to publish the Journal of Antibiotics, with the Japan Society for Human Genetics to publish the Journal of Human Genetics and with the Japan Society of Hypertension to publish Hypertension Research.

The NPG Asia Materials website (www.natureasia.com/asia-materials) hosted on NPG’s regional website at www.natureasia.com publishes research highlights each month written by experienced NPG-selected science writers. The highlights describe in easy-to-understand terms articles published in leading journals that are authored by researchers in the Asia-Pacific region. The articles highlighted are selected by an editorial committee headed by Hideo Takezoe, a leading polymer researcher at Tokyo Institute of Technology, and are based on recommendations from an advisory committee of scientists from around the Asia-Pacific region. Peer-reviewed primary research and review articles will be added at a later stage to create an Asian-based journal that will move onto NPG’s main website at www.nature.com.

“It is a tremendous boon to NPG to be announcing this collection of new initiatives in the region,” says David Swinbanks, the Publishing Director of NPG responsible for the Asia-Pacific region and CEO of NPG Nature Asia-Pacific. “By building on the reputations of these five international journals and by launching the NPG Asia Materials website we can publish and highlight some of the best research from the region in the life, medical, chemical and physical sciences and communicate it to the relevant communities around the world.”

These landmark agreements, alongside the recent launches of the Nature China, A‑IMBN Research and Nature India websites (see www.natureasia.com), and the launch of the journal Nature Photonics with its core editorial team based in Tokyo, mark the next steps in NPG’s broader strategy to publish the best research in the Asia-Pacific region.

About NPG and NPG Nature Asia-Pacific
Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is a division of Macmillan Publishers Ltd, dedicated to serving the academic, professional scientific and medical communities. NPG's flagship title, Nature, was first published in 1869. Other publications include Nature research journals, Nature Reviews, Nature Clinical Practice and a range of prestigious academic journals including society-owned publications. NPG also provides news content through Nature News. Scientific career information and free job postings are offered on Naturejobs.

NPG Nature Asia-Pacific is the Asia-Pacific wing of NPG, set up to serve the growing needs of the scientific, engineering and medical communities in the region, and has offices in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Delhi and Melbourne. For more information, please visit www.natureasia.com.

NPG is a global company with headquarters in London and offices in New York, San Francisco, Washington DC, Boston, Tokyo, Paris, Madrid, Munich, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Delhi, Mexico City and Basingstoke. For more information, please go to www.nature.com.