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A letter to the editor is presented which discusses emergence of impact disparity in science , wherein only few papers earn the biggest share of citations, reflecting the income disparity in the U.S.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "Achievement index climbs the ranks" in the September 2007 issue.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "Cash For Papers: Putting a Premium on Publication," in the 2006 issue.

Presents a letter to the editor in response to Vladimir Svetlov's comments on the publication of S.C.Meyer's "intelligent design" paper in the previous issue of the journal "Nature."

A letter to the editor is presented regarding the website which provides the author statistics regarding their articles that were published in the journals of Nature Publishing Group.

A letter to the editor is presented regarding the effect of language of publication on application-oriented fields in research performance and rankings of universities in hosting researches.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article about the metrics used in the assessment of the impact of scientists on the publishing behaviour of journals by Jevin West in the previous issue.

The article presents a letter to the editor concerning the obituary of Anatol Zhabotinsky, which was published in the volume 455, number 1053 issue.

A letter to the editor is presented about the sender's comment on online publications.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to articles in previous issues of "Nature" magazine.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "Who will start the 3Rs ball rolling for animal welfare?," published in the previous issue.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "Doubts over evolution block funding by Canadian agency" in volume 440.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "Credit where credit's due," in the 2006 issue.

Presents a letter to the editor in response to the editorial "Too Much, Too Soon," which appeared in a previous issue of the journal "Nature."

A letter to the editor in response to the article "Standards for Papers on Cloning" published in the 2006 issue of "Nature" is presented.

Replying to C. M. Hein, S. Engels, D. Kishkinev & H. Mouritsen 471, doi:10.1038/nature09875 (2011)Hein and colleagues challenge our 2002 paper, claiming that they cannot replicate our findings. The paper had two conclusions: (1) magnetic compass information is mediated by the eyes, as had been proposed by Ritz and colleagues, and (2) the magnetic compass is lateralized in favour of the right eye. The new data do not contradict the first conclusion; in fact, this has been supported by a recent paper from the authors. It is only the second conclusion they question, although it has been demonstrated not only in two species of migrants, but also in domestic chickens and is the basis of a new paper indicating an interaction between contour vision and magnetoreception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Replying to R. C. P. Mounce & M. Wills 476, 10.1038/nature10266 (2011); D. A. Legg et al. 476 10.1038/nature10267 (2011)We welcome the reanalyses by Mounce and Wills and Legg et al. of our paper, and although we do not fully concur with their conclusions we are pleased that Diania has reopened the debate about key stages in arthropod evolution. We accept that the position of this fossil remains sensitive to parameters of analysis and in the original publication we conceded that our best-supported tree-Diania as sister-group to (Schinderhannes + Euarthropoda)-could be subject to change, and that the 'walking cactus' may have a more basal position within the overall framework of the arthropod stem-group. These alternative treatments of our data would seem to confirm this suspicion, although we find the placement of Diania in an unresolved, and extremely basal, polytomy alongside velvet worms, tardigrades and various other lobopodians similarly problematical. We do not doubt that the authors' results are statistically well supported, but what do these cladograms tell us about the evolution of the group? Lobopodians are, by their nature, fairly simple and consequently yield few convincing synapomorphies, either with each other or with arthropods in general. As we discovered, this makes scoring a robust data matrix including both lobopodians and arthropods challenging, and we wonder whether the basal polytomies recovered here are simply due to clustering among taxa with few unequivocal apomorphies and/or much missing data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Replying to N. K. Logothetis 468, 10.1038/nature09532 (2010)This is a welcome opportunity to discuss ofMRI, a technology for testing the causal and global impact of defined cell populations in vivo. The accompanying Comment reviews well-known neuroanatomy, but does seem, in its entirety, to be founded on a suggestion that, after experiments were conducted to drive a defined circuit element and measure resulting BOLD signals, we concluded that no other contributory circuit element was recruited by the driven population. This was not the case, however, as correctly understood by others in the fMRI community and as explained in the paper (for example, 'contributions from additional cells and processes downstream of the defined optically triggered population are expected and indeed represent an important aspect of this approach'). Moreover, the complexity of the brain dictates that such possible contributory mechanisms are more numerous than listed in the Comment, including many other circuit and feedback mechanisms and classes of cells within neural circuitry. As was discussed, this is one of the most important and useful aspects of the ofMRI approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article by Heather Piwowar in the 2013 issue regarding the lists of research papers being asked by the Medical Research Council (MRC) in Great Britain in their grant-application process.

A letter to the editor is presented regarding the impact of the increased of scientific papers published in China which are being inflated by a payment scheme offered by some Chinese institutions to boost journal publications.

A letter to the editor is presented concerning the prepublication of scientific papers on arXiv.org servers which is superior to the author pays model of open-access journal publishing.

A letter to the editor is presented which discusses a debate regarding self-archiving of pre-and-post print versions of research papers on the arXiv.org server, an open-access publishing, in high-energy physics.

A letter to the editor is presented regarding the need for clear policy on inclusion of deceased authors on contribution to the paper.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article regarding the Finch report on the methods to promote universal open access on scientific papers in the 2012 issue.

A letter to the editor is presented concerning the gold route to open-access research papers in Great Britain.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to an article by Mario Livio regarding the differences on the original 1927 paper on the expansion of the universe by Georges Lemaitre and its translated version in 1931.

Replying to J. Ellis & N. E. Mavromatos 479, doi:10.1038/nature10619 (2011)In a previous paper, I used the gauge-invariant background-field method to calculate a contribution to the renormalization of electric charge due to quantum gravity that was quadratically dependent on an energy cut-off. This was done by taking a constant electromagnetic background field, F. The result was used to support the original suggestion of Robinson and Wilczek that quadratic divergences could lead to asymptotic freedom. This result has been criticized by Ellis and Mavromatos and their present submission gives a shortened and altered discussion of their viewpoint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article which discusses the conflict of the invisibility of negative results which is emphasized by the media storm against a paper supporting defending extrasensory perception in the January 5, 2011 issue.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article which recommends the appointment of a senior department member as a co-author of the papers published by the "Nature" journal in the 2010 issue.

A letter to the editor and a reply are presented in response to the article which recommends the appointment of a senior department member as co-author of journal papers in the 2010 issue.

A letter to the editor is presented regarding the plagiarized papers submitted to the "Journal of Zhejiang University-Science" in China.

Replying to: J. H. Geisler & J. M. Theodor 458, 10.1038/nature07776 (2009)The analysis of Geisler and Theodor confirms our main phylogenetic result, that raoellids are, or include, the sister group to cetaceans. Their study expands on our findings by inferring that hippopotamids are the sister group to the combined raoellid–cetacean clade, whereas our paper had explicitly stated that our data could not address the position of the extant artiodactyl families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Replying to: H. F. Jørgensen, Z.-F. Chen, M. Merkenschlager & A. G. Fisher 457, 10.1038/nature07783; N. J. Buckley, R. Johnson, Y.-M. Sun & L. W. Stanton 457, 10.1038/nature07784 (2009)In contrast to the comments made by Jørgensen et al. and Buckley et al., our experiments showed that REST maintains the self-renewal and pluripotency of mouse embryonic stem cells (mESCs). Two recent papers support our work: ref. 4 indicated that REST is indeed in the network that regulates ESC self-renewal and pluripotency and ref. 5 showed that mESCs with lower REST levels derived from a mouse model of Down’s syndrome have decreased levels of self-renewal markers and a higher propensity towards differentiation, even when cultured in the presence of LIF. We note that Buckley and Stanton also recently concluded that REST is part of the Oct4–Sox2–Nanog regulatory network and has “a key role in the maintenance of the ESC phenotype”. We proposed that REST represses a set of microRNAs that potentially target self-renewal genes. At least one of them, miR-21, represses self-renewal, probably by destabilizing the messenger RNAs of Sox2 and/or Nanog (not Tbx3 or c-Myc as suggested by Buckley et al.). In this model, changes in the cellular environment that counter this function of REST or stimulate the mRNA levels of Sox2 or Nanog could minimize the effect of REST. For this reason, in our study we used mESCs with a low passage number, and we cultured them without feeder cells to avoid possible contributions of the feeder cells or an adaptive response to high passage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the articles "A tale of two citations" and "Entire-paper plagiarism caught by software" in 2008 issues.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "Entire-paper plagiarism caught by software," featured in a 2008 issue.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the previously published articles "On the paper trail" and "Researchers criticized for poor time-keeping."

A letter to the editor is presented in response to C. Jimenez's reply to the article "Animal-Welfare Section in Papers Would Be a Burden," by Victoria Buck in the 2007 issue.

A letter to the editor is presented about the common words found in the result or conclusion of abstracts of scientific research papers.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "Standards for papers on cloning" in the 2006 issue.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "Standard for Papers on Cloning," in the 2006 issue.

A letter to the editor in response to the article "Standards for Papers on Cloning" published in the 2006 issue is presented.

Presents a letter to the editor in response to two correspondence from Vladimir Svetlov about the proliferation of peer-reviewed journals and the publication of flawed papers, published in the previous issues of the journal "Nature."

Presents a letter to the editor of "Nature," about the magazine's editorial decision not to send the Watson and Crick paper on DNA structure for peer review.

The transcriptomes of eukaryotic cells are incredibly complex. Individual non-coding RNAs dwarf the number of protein-coding genes, and include classes that are well understood as well as classes for which the nature, extent and functional roles are obscure. Deep sequencing of small RNAs (<200 nucleotides) from human HeLa and HepG2 cells revealed a remarkable breadth of species. These arose both from within annotated genes and from unannotated intergenic regions. Overall, small RNAs tended to align with CAGE (cap-analysis of gene expression) tags, which mark the 5′ ends of capped, long RNA transcripts. Many small RNAs, including the previously described promoter-associated small RNAs, appeared to possess cap structures. Members of an extensive class of both small RNAs and CAGE tags were distributed across internal exons of annotated protein coding and non-coding genes, sometimes crossing exon–exon junctions. Here we show that processing of mature mRNAs through an as yet unknown mechanism may generate complex populations of both long and short RNAs whose apparently capped 5′ ends coincide. Supplying synthetic promoter-associated small RNAs corresponding to the c-MYC transcriptional start site reduced MYC messenger RNA abundance. The studies presented here expand the catalogue of cellular small RNAs and demonstrate a biological impact for at least one class of non-canonical small RNAs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]