So I see that Nature Chemistry looks to be fueling up to launch. I’m curious to see how that one will do. The other Nature journals have done pretty well at preserving the prestige of the name, but I hope that they haven’t reached the point of diminishing returns just when they get to my specialty.

And this will be unusual, since you don’t see many attempts to launch a high-end journal from scratch. Most new journals aim for the middle (or worse), figuring that that’s where the papers will come from. But Nature Chemistry will presumably try to compete with JACS and Angewandte Chemie. My guess is that they’ll be able to do that, which means that the journals one tier down will be the ones that feel the consequences. On the other hand, it’s not like Nature has a reputation for paying much attention to chemistry over the years, so perhaps the cachet won’t carry over in the same way that it did for, say, Nature Medicine. We shall see. . .