As a growing company, Nature Research is able to publish ever more papers in astronomy, astrophysics and planetary science. But these papers are published in separate journals, directed at different parts of the community, across independent websites. And there is often more to a paper than meets the eye, whether it is a fascinating back story or a glorious image that didn’t fit in the journal. 

With this integrated Community site, it will be easier to engage with the editors and other members with similar interests. The idea is to provide a forum to complement the journals collectively. We hope that people will enjoy browsing posts from editors, authors and contributors from the public and taking part in discussions or information sharing. These posts can contain text, images or video. 

We’re launching with a limited number of ‘channels’ and we will be adding categories as the site becomes more populated. As examples, ‘Behind the paper’ posts are written by the authors of recently published papers, ‘On the road’ will cover conferences and site/lab visits, and no astronomy website would be complete without a ‘Gallery’ of images. In this case, we will be including images submitted as cover art (with the authors’ permission of course). 

The Community is open to everyone, and anyone can post or comment on posts. If you wish to become a Contributor so that your posts will appear in the latest content on the homepage, in the channels and the weekly email, please contact us through communities@nature.com. If you would like to post a question for the editors, just click on the ‘Q&A’ icon in the menu on the left or at the top right of the page (below the banner image) and we will do our best to answer it as quickly as possible. I look forward to hearing from you.