Nature is one of the world's leading scientific journals, publishing many papers that receive wide attention by the general public. But, Nature is very selective-- <7% of submitted papers are published. In order to maximize your chances of getting published, papers should present fundamental new physical insights, or startling observations/results. Theory papers pose additional problems, as we want only those papers that are likely to be the correct explanation, and not simply exploring parameter space. The writing should be clear, concise and directed at the level of a graduate course in the subject. I encourage authors to contact me in advance of submission of a paper, both to ascertain the appropriateness of the result for Nature, and to ensure that the writing is close to our standards. Posting to ArXiv is and always has been allowed, but authors should discuss the specifics with their institutional public affairs officers before doing so. Lapses in professional ethics seem to be on the rise – I will discuss some examples, and what we should be doing to keep astronomy clean. 

个人简介: Dr. Sage received his PhD under Phil Solomon at Stony Brook in 1987 and continued a post-doc in Socorro at New Mexico Tech and then at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, after which he moved to the University of Nevada-Las Vegas as a visiting assistant professor. In 1993 he joined Nature. He is now the Visiting Senior Research Scientist at the University of Maryland,  the press officer for the Canadian Astronomical Society, and a columnist for the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.