Nature Nanotechnology

About Nature Nanotechnology

Journal Overview

Nature Nanotechnology is a monthly, peer-reviewed scientific journal devoted to research across nanoscience and nanotechnology. It is published by Nature Portfolio, the academic publishing division of Springer Nature, and it sits within the same family of journals as Nature, Nature Materials, Nature Physics and the other Nature-branded titles. The journal publishes twelve issues a year and describes its mission as publishing the best research from across nanoscience and nanotechnology.

The journal's bibliographic identifiers are well established: its print ISSN is 1748-3387 and its electronic ISSN (EISSN) is 1748-3395. The correct abbreviation for abstracting and indexing purposes is Nat. Nanotechnol. All editorial decisions are made by a team of full-time professional editors employed by the publisher — the journal, like the other Nature titles, has no external editorial board.

Nature Nanotechnology operates as a hybrid journal. Authors whose primary research articles are accepted may publish either through the traditional subscription model at no author fee, or through gold open access by paying an article processing charge. The journal serves an intentionally broad, interdisciplinary readership: chemists, physicists, materials scientists, biomedical researchers, engineers and others working at the frontiers of the nanoscale, and its published content spans fundamental discoveries through to device development and technology applications.

History

Nature Nanotechnology was launched in October 2006, with its first issue appearing that month. The launch came at a moment when nanotechnology was attracting enormous scientific and public interest: governments worldwide were investing billions in nano-focused research programs, and tens of thousands of papers on nanotechnology topics were being published every year. The new journal was designed to give this diverse, fast-moving field a selective home journal within the Nature family, parallel to what Nature Materials (launched 2000) had done for materials science.

The early issues of the journal reflect the breadth of the field it set out to cover. Its first-year highlights included work such as a carbon-nanotube superconducting quantum interference device (nanoSQUID), methods for sorting carbon nanotubes by electronic structure using density differentiation, a commentary on how the scanning tunnelling and atomic force microscopes opened the doors to the nanoworld, and a feature asking the definitional question "what exactly is nanotechnology?" — contributions from chemists, physicists, materials scientists, engineers and biomedical researchers alike.

In October 2016 the journal marked its tenth anniversary with an editorial titled "Ten and counting," looking back on the first decade. The editors reflected that their guiding view since the first issue had simply been to publish the most significant results on physical systems in which a key component has nanoscale dimensions. Over that decade the journal covered both well-established fields at launch — the toxicity of nanomaterials, carbon nanotubes, quantum dots and scanning probes — and entirely new research areas as they emerged, notably graphene and other two-dimensional materials after the first graphene paper in Science (2004), DNA origami following its first report in Nature (2006), and nanotechnology-enabled work in fields not traditionally considered nanoscience, such as quantum information and the monitoring of electrical signals from neurons. The journal has continued publication without interruption to the present day, and its twentieth anniversary would fall in October 2026.

Leadership and Editorial Team

A notable point of editorial history: the journal's leadership changed in January 2022. Fabio Pulizzi served as Chief Editor of Nature Nanotechnology from July 2012 to January 2022 — nearly ten years. He joined Nature Research in January 2006 as an associate editor at Nature Materials (handling manuscripts in materials physics) before moving to Nature Nanotechnology in 2012. During his tenure he extended the journal's scope into environmental nanotechnology, nanotechnology applications in clean water and sustainable agriculture, and the regulation of engineered nanomaterials. In 2020 he worked on the project to launch Nature Water, and in January 2022 he was appointed Chief Editor of that journal. Pulizzi has a degree in physics from the University of Rome La Sapienza, Italy, and a PhD in physics from the University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands; he previously held postdoctoral positions at the University of Nottingham and the University of Sheffield in the UK. This is worth stating explicitly because several third-party journal-directory sites still list him as the current editor — he is not; he has led Nature Water since January 2022.

The current Chief Editor is Alberto Moscatelli, PhD, who took over in January 2022 and is based in Berlin. Moscatelli earned a first degree in environmental sciences from the University of Urbino in Italy and a PhD in chemistry, with distinction, from Columbia University in 2008, where he studied reactive intermediates of photochemical reactions in nanoconfined spaces. He then held a postdoctoral position at Carnegie Mellon University, studying the photophysical properties of fluorescent polymers used in organic LEDs. He joined Nature Research in October 2010 and has worked at Nature Nanotechnology since March 2012 — meaning he brought roughly a decade of in-house editorial experience to the chief editorship.

The professional editorial team includes Senior Editor Chiara Pastore, PhD, based in London. Pastore holds a first degree and PhD in chemistry from the University of Pisa and Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa; her doctoral work focused on the structural biology and biochemistry of iron-binding proteins, with research time at EMBL Heidelberg and the National Institute for Medical Research in London, followed by postdoctoral work on protein–RNA interactions at Columbia University and viral proteins at Imperial College London. She began her editorial career in October 2015 and joined Nature Nanotechnology in June 2017. (Note: editorial rosters at Nature Portfolio journals evolve; the journal's team page lists individual editors, and names beyond those named here are not confirmed in this profile.)

Above the journal's own team sit the Nature Portfolio editorial managers: Deborah Sweet (Executive Vice President, Nature Portfolio), Erika Pastrana (Vice President, Nature Research Journals Portfolio), Stuart Cantrill (Editorial Director), and Magdalena Skipper (Editor-in-Chief of the Nature journals). The editorial office is located at The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London N1 9XW, UK; editorial inquiries go to naturenano@nature.com, and the journal maintains the social account @NatureNano.

Nature Nanotechnology also maintains an Advisory Panel in Nanotechnology and Society, which assists the editorial team in commissioning Commentaries, Perspectives and Reviews and in suggesting topics for News & Views and editorials on the societal impact of nanotechnology. Its members are Diana Bowman (Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law & School for the Future of Innovation in Society, Arizona State University), Steffen Foss Hansen (Department of Environmental Engineering, Technical University of Denmark), Andrew Maynard (School for the Future of Innovation in Society, Arizona State University), Fern Wickson (GenØk – Centre for Biosafety, Tromsø, Norway) and Julie Zimmerman (School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Yale University). This panel is advisory — it does not make publication decisions.

Aims & Scope

The following is a paraphrase of the journal's official aims and scope as stated on nature.com. Nature Nanotechnology is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes papers of the highest quality and significance across all areas of nanoscience and nanotechnology. Its coverage centres on research into the design, characterisation and production of structures, devices and systems involving the manipulation and control of materials and phenomena at the atomic, molecular and macromolecular scales. Research following bottom-up approaches, top-down approaches and combinations of the two are all within scope.

The journal actively encourages exchange of ideas among chemists, physicists, materials scientists, biomedical researchers, engineers and other researchers working at the frontiers of this diverse, multidisciplinary field. Its remit extends from basic research in physics, chemistry and biology — including computational work and simulations — through to the development of new devices and technologies for applications in a wide range of industrial sectors, explicitly including information technology, medicine, manufacturing, high-performance materials, and energy and environmental technologies. Organic, inorganic and hybrid materials are all covered.

In practical terms, this means the journal is not restricted to a single discipline or application domain. Its published content has ranged from fundamental phenomena at the nanoscale (quantum transport, self-assembly, nanoscale optics and plasmonics) to applied technologies (nanoelectronics, nanophotonics, nanomedicine, energy storage and conversion, sensing and diagnostics), as well as the environmental, health and safety dimensions of nanomaterials — a scope area deliberately expanded under the previous chief editor. What unites published papers, in the editors' own framing since 2006, is significance: the most significant results on physical systems in which a key component has nanoscale dimensions.

Editorial Process and Peer Review

Like the other Nature titles, Nature Nanotechnology has no external editorial board. Instead, all editorial decisions are made by a dedicated team of professional, full-time editors with relevant research and editorial backgrounds — the editors named above and their colleagues, rather than academic associate editors.

Manuscripts submitted through the journal's online submission system first undergo an editorial assessment: an editor evaluates the submission for fit with the journal's scope, quality and significance. This initial triage is the source of the journal's published median of 11 days from submission to first editorial decision, which counts both manuscripts sent out for peer review and those rejected at this stage.

Manuscripts selected for review are sent to at least one, and usually two or more, independent reviewers chosen by the editors — this is the standard Nature Portfolio peer-review publication policy that applies across the portfolio's journals. Authors are welcome to suggest suitable independent reviewers and may also request that the journal exclude one or two individuals or laboratories; the journal sympathetically considers such requests and usually honours them, but the editor's decision on the choice of referees is final. Peer review is confidential and anonymous: reviewers' identities are not released to authors unless a reviewer declares themselves as part of open peer review, and all parties must keep manuscript details, referees' reports and correspondence confidential. Notably, the submission guidelines offer authors the option of participating in double-anonymized peer review, in which author identities are concealed from reviewers.

Final decisions rest with the editors, who weigh reviewers' advice alongside their own assessment of significance and scope. The published median of 222 days from submission to acceptance reflects that the full cycle — including all rounds of review and revision — is measured, not just the review period alone. After acceptance, corresponding authors are asked to link their ORCID identifier to their manuscript tracking account, and the manuscript moves into production.

The journal also provides formal routes for appeals and transfers: authors may appeal against an editorial decision or transfer a submission to another journal within the portfolio. It accepts presubmission enquiries, allowing authors to ask editors about a manuscript's likely suitability before submitting. A preprint policy applies (administered alongside the "In Review" preprint service), so authors posting preprints are not excluded from consideration — the specific terms are set out in the journal's editorial policies. As with all Nature Portfolio journals, the publisher reserves the right to contact funders, institutions and regulatory bodies in cases of suspected research or publishing misconduct.

Impact and Metrics

Springer Nature is a signatory of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), and the journal's own metrics page reminds readers that citation measures such as the two-year Journal Impact Factor are influenced by small numbers of highly cited articles and are not, in the publisher's view, necessarily measures of journal quality. With that context, the journal publishes the following official metrics on its journal-impact page (figures shown are the 2025 values):

The two-year impact factor of 37.5 places Nature Nanotechnology among the highest-cited journals in the materials science and nanoscience categories. For context, the journal's impact factor has historically ranged in the mid-to-high 30s: it was 38.3 in the 2022 Journal Citation Reports, 38.1 for 2023 and 34.9 for 2024 before rising to 37.5 for 2025 — normal year-to-year fluctuation for a citation metric of this kind, which the publisher explicitly cautions against reading as a quality score for any individual article.

The speed metrics deserve careful reading. The median of 11 days to first editorial decision measures the time from submission to either dispatch for peer review or rejection — so it reflects rapid editorial triage, not rapid review. The median of 222 days from submission to acceptance includes all peer review and revision time, consistent with a highly selective journal where accepted papers typically go through substantive revision. Usage is substantial: more than 6.5 million full-text downloads in 2025 (COUNTER5-compliant counts of HTML, LookInside, PDF and ePub accesses on the journal website and SpringerLink) and over 7,000 Altmetric mentions across news, blogs, policy documents and social media. Article-level metrics — downloads, citations and online attention — are displayed on each article page.

What is not officially published: the journal does not publish an acceptance rate, and no official acceptance-rate figure appears on its website. Third-party directory sites sometimes carry estimates; these are unofficial and should not be cited as fact.

Submission Guidelines

Submissions are made through the journal's online submission system; the journal states that complete manuscripts should not be sent by email. The submission guidelines on nature.com walk authors through five stages:

1. Before initial submission. Authors are asked to confirm that Nature Nanotechnology is the most suitable journal for their work (checking the aims and scope), that the journal accepts their content type, and to read and understand the editorial policies and the publishing models and costs. The journal accepts presubmission enquiries, and its preprint policy (together with the "In Review" service) allows manuscripts posted as preprints.

2. Preparing the manuscript. Authors should ensure the submission is complete, follow the initial formatting requirements, and make sure the manuscript is accurate and readable. Authors may choose to participate in double-anonymized peer review, for which specific requirements apply (such as removing identifying information from the manuscript files).

3. Editorial process, peer review, appeals and transfers. Once submitted, the manuscript goes through the editorial process described above; authors whose papers are sent for review receive an email asking them to read and sign the editorial policies. Formal procedures exist for appealing decisions and for transferring submissions to other journals.

4. Acceptance in principle and formatting. Accepted articles first reach "acceptance in principle," after which authors follow the journal's detailed formatting guidelines. Before final acceptance, corresponding authors are requested to link their ORCID to their manuscript tracking system account.

5. Production and publication. Once formally accepted, the manuscript is sent to production to prepare for publication.

The journal publishes a variety of content types — the site's content sections include Articles, Review Articles, Perspectives, News & Views, Comments, Editorials, Technology Features and obituaries — and its submission guidelines direct authors to the content-types page to check that their manuscript type is accepted before submitting. General editorial inquiries and manuscript-status queries go to naturenano@nature.com; authors receive an email acknowledging each submission.

Open Access and APC

Nature Nanotechnology is a hybrid journal: authors of accepted primary research articles may choose between two publishing models.

1. Traditional subscription model. The article is assessed by the editors, and if suitable it is put through peer review; if successful it is published and made available to subscribing institutions and individuals or to readers who pay for individual articles. No fee is charged to the author under this route.

2. Gold open access. The publishing and peer-review process is identical; the difference is that on acceptance, the author(s) or their funder(s) pay an article processing charge and the final published article is then free to read for everyone, published under a Creative Commons licence that allows reuse and sharing under the licence terms. The APC to publish gold open access in Nature Nanotechnology is £9,390.00 / $12,850.00 / €10,850.00, subject to VAT or local taxes where applicable. This figure is stated on the journal's official publishing-options page.

An important limitation: non-primary research articles — such as Reviews, Comments and News & Views — are not eligible for gold open access and can only be published via the traditional subscription route; they should not include original, previously unpublished research findings. Springer Nature offers institutional open-access agreements that may cover APCs for eligible authors, as well as APC waivers and discounts for corresponding authors based in the world's lowest-income countries; requests from other authors are considered case by case on grounds of financial need, and applications should be made at the point of submission, not during review or after acceptance.

Key Facts

FAQs

1. What is Nature Nanotechnology?

It is a monthly, peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Nature Portfolio (Springer Nature) covering research across all areas of nanoscience and nanotechnology, from fundamental nanoscale phenomena to devices, materials and applications.

2. When was Nature Nanotechnology founded?

The journal was launched in October 2006, with its first issue published that month. It marked its tenth anniversary in October 2016.

3. Who is the current editor of Nature Nanotechnology?

The Chief Editor is Alberto Moscatelli, PhD, who has held the role since January 2022 and is based in Berlin. His predecessor was Fabio Pulizzi (2012–2022), who is now Chief Editor of Nature Water. Note that some third-party sites still list Pulizzi — the journal's own team page confirms Moscatelli.

4. What is the impact factor of Nature Nanotechnology?

The official 2025 Journal Impact Factor displayed on the journal's metrics page is 37.5, with a 5-year impact factor of 42.6. The publisher notes it is a DORA signatory and that the impact factor should not be read as a quality score for individual articles.

5. What is the journal's ISSN?

The print ISSN is 1748-3387 and the electronic ISSN is 1748-3395. The standard abbreviation is Nat. Nanotechnol.

6. Is Nature Nanotechnology open access?

It is a hybrid journal. Authors can publish through the traditional subscription model at no fee, or choose gold open access, which makes the article free to read for everyone under a Creative Commons licence in exchange for an article processing charge.

7. What is the article processing charge (APC)?

The gold open-access APC stated on the journal's official publishing-options page is £9,390 / $12,850 / €10,850, subject to VAT or local taxes. Reviews, Comments and News & Views are not eligible for gold open access.

8. What is the journal's acceptance rate?

Not officially published. The journal does not state an acceptance rate on its website; any figures found on third-party sites are unofficial estimates and should be treated as such.

9. How long does peer review take?

The journal's official medians are 11 days from submission to first editorial decision (which includes rejections at editorial triage) and 222 days from submission to acceptance (including all review and revision rounds).

10. How does the editorial process work?

All editorial decisions are made by full-time professional editors — there is no external editorial board. Submissions first undergo editorial assessment; those selected for review are sent to at least one, usually two or more, independent reviewers chosen by the editors. Peer review is confidential and anonymous, with a double-anonymized option available to authors.

11. Can I submit a presubmission enquiry or a preprint?

Yes to both. The journal accepts presubmission enquiries about a manuscript's suitability, and its preprint policy (with the "In Review" service) allows manuscripts posted as preprints to be considered for publication.

12. How do I submit a manuscript?

Manuscripts are submitted through the journal's online submission system (linked from the submission guidelines page). Complete manuscripts should not be sent by email; general editorial queries go to naturenano@nature.com.

13. What topics does the journal cover?

All areas of nanoscience and nanotechnology: the design, characterisation and production of structures, devices and systems at atomic, molecular and macromolecular scales — spanning basic physics, chemistry and biology (including computation and simulation) to devices and technologies for information technology, medicine, manufacturing, high-performance materials, energy and environmental technologies, using organic, inorganic and hybrid materials.

14. Does the journal have an editorial board?

No external editorial board. It has a professional in-house editorial team plus an Advisory Panel in Nanotechnology and Society (members from Arizona State University, the Technical University of Denmark, GenØk in Tromsø and Yale University) that assists with commissioning content on the societal impact of nanotechnology.