Major Revision at Nature Communications: What It Means, Next Steps

The decisive line is whether your submission date and referee continuity survive. A major revision preserves both, which is why it is materially stronger than a reject-with-transfer that moves the paper to a different editorial team.

Nature Communications does not report an acceptance-after-major-revision rate, so any precise Nature Communications-specific number you encounter is fabricated. The defensible framing rests on two verifiable facts: Nature Communications's overall acceptance rate is roughly 20 percent, and a manuscript at major revision has already passed the desk screen and a round of external review.

• Reaching a major revision means you cleared the filter that removes 50 to 60 percent of submissions before review.
• Editorial commitment is real but conditional and bounded: handling editors retain discretion to reject after re-review, and the two-resubmission limit caps how many rounds you get.
• The general cross-journal figure that 60 to 80 percent of major revisions are eventually accepted is a useful prior, but Nature Communications is more selective than the journals that range describes, and the resubmission cap raises the stakes of the first revision.
• SciRev community-reported data on Nature Communications describes the journal's review experience but, like every public source, carries no acceptance-after-major-revision figure, which is why the honest read here stays directional rather than numeric.

Spend your energy resolving every editor-flagged concern in the first resubmission rather than estimating a percentage Nature Communications does not publish.

The Nature Communications decision letter specifies the deadline, typically two months, and revisions returned within that period retain their original submission date. Retaining the submission date protects priority on contested findings, so the deadline is not a formality. Missing it can convert the major revision into a fresh submission with a new date and a lost referee history.

If the experiments will not fit two months, contact the editorial office through the Nature Communications Manuscript Tracking System at mts-ncomms.nature.com with your manuscript ID before the deadline; naturecomms@nature.com handles editorial-office inquiries. Editors routinely grant reasonable extensions when referees asked for added experiments; the avoidable failure is going silent and resurfacing after the window has closed.

Hold the revised Article within Nature Communications length norms while you add the requested work: the main-text guideline is roughly 5,000 words with a 150-word abstract and up to 10 display items, and Supplementary Information absorbs the overflow. If a major revision pushes the paper past those limits, plan the trim before you resubmit. Confirm open-access economics too, because Nature Communications is fully open access and charges an article processing charge of about $7,350 (£5,490) on acceptance, so a funder conversation belongs in the revision window rather than after a positive decision.

A revised Nature Communications manuscript is normally sent back to some or all of the original referees. They read your point-by-point response before they re-read the manuscript, and they decide quickly whether you engaged seriously with their reports. Nature Communications referees evaluate cross-disciplinary advance, scientific rigor, and reproducibility; on re-review they check whether the specific concerns they raised are now resolved in the manuscript itself. If the paper is accepted, the referee reports and your responses may be published under the transparent peer-review model.

Nature Communications asks for two documents alongside the revised manuscript: a cover letter explaining how the manuscript changed, and a separate point-by-point response to the referees' comments. The response is what the referees read first.

1. Cover letter plus point-by-point response. Keep the cover letter to a concise summary of the changes; put the detailed engagement in the separate point-by-point document.
2. Quote, act, locate. Restate each referee comment, state your action, and point to the exact page, figure, or reporting-summary item that changed.
3. Re-anchor the cross-disciplinary advance where that was the concern. If a referee questioned scope rather than data, the revision must move the broad claim into the title, abstract, and first figure, not just add experiments.
4. Disagree honestly and within the editor's roadmap. A major revision means the editor saw a path to acceptance, so you can push back on a referee request the editor did not specifically endorse, with literature support and courtesy, never dismissively, and never on a point the editor flagged.
5. Make the first resubmission count. With only two resubmissions allowed, treat round one as the round that must close every editor-flagged concern, and write the response cleanly since it may be published.

Route your revised manuscript through a Nature Communications point-by-point response check so the cross-disciplinary framing and reporting completeness are verified against the referees' concerns before you resubmit.

• Do not treat the second resubmission as a safety net. With two allowed, the first must resolve every editor-flagged concern.
• Do not leave the cross-disciplinary advance in the cover letter while only adding data. Referees re-check the framing.
• Do not skimp on the reporting summary, source data, or code. Reproducibility is a named referee focus on re-review.
• Do not respond defensively. Referees re-reading a combative response look harder for reasons to reject, and the response may be published.
• Do not promise changes the manuscript does not contain. Referees verify the file.
• Do not miss the two-month deadline without contact, which can reset your submission date.

In our pre-submission review work with Nature Communications manuscripts, three patterns most often turn a possible acceptance into a major revision, and the same three most often decide whether the revision then survives a referee re-review. These are anonymized observations from Manusights pre-submission and revision review, not access to Springer Nature editorial records. Each is a named failure pattern tied to a specific Nature Communications editorial expectation, and in practice we see them recur across the manuscripts we screen. The useful question for a revising author is whether the revised abstract, first figure, Methods, reporting summary, and response to reviewers already answer the concern in the manuscript itself.

Cross-disciplinary advance that the data support but the writing strands in the cover letter. In Nature Communications manuscripts, the most common reason for a major revision is not a flawed experiment but a cross-disciplinary advance that lives in the cover letter or discussion rather than the title, abstract, and first figure. The professional editors triage on cross-disciplinary readability, so referees grant a major revision to force the framing to match the evidence. The strongest revisions rewrite the abstract and Figure 1 so a reader outside the immediate subfield can name the advance in one sentence, then carry that claim through the introduction and discussion. Because Nature Communications limits you to two resubmissions, a revision that adds data without re-anchoring the framing wastes a round, since the same referee concern returns.

Reporting-summary and reproducibility gaps that re-review tests directly. In Nature Communications manuscripts, referees frequently grant a major revision while flagging incomplete reporting: missing reporting-summary items, absent randomization or blinding statements, thin statistical reporting, or data-availability and code-availability documentation that would not let another lab reproduce the central result. The decision reads as a major revision because the science is promising, but the path to acceptance runs through the Methods, the figure legends, the source data, and the reporting summary. Because the reports and responses may be published if the paper is accepted, the strongest revisions close every flagged item with an exact manuscript location in the response, so the re-reviewing referee can verify the fix without reconstructing it from the supplement.

First revisions written as if a third round were coming. In Nature Communications manuscripts, the revision that fails on re-review is often not the one with the hardest experiments but the one whose first response partially answers the referees, drops a point, or describes a change that is not actually in the manuscript, on the assumption that the second resubmission will catch the gap. With a two-resubmission cap, the second round is the last, so a partial first revision leaves little margin. The strongest responses treat the first resubmission as the round that must resolve every editor-flagged concern, conceding valid points clearly and showing each change in place.

This page tells you what Nature Communications handling editors and referees look for when they re-read a revised manuscript. The review tells you whether YOUR revised paper and response to reviewers pass that check before you resubmit. Use this page when you have just received a major revision at Nature Communications and need to decide what to fix first, given that only two resubmissions are allowed. We have reviewed manuscripts targeting Nature Communications and peer Nature Portfolio venues in pre-submission and revision contexts; the named patterns above are the same ones referees flag on re-review. 60-day money-back guarantee. We do not train AI on your manuscript and delete it within 24 hours.

Of the 98 manuscripts our team reviewed for this Nature Communications decision-outcome pattern sample, the strongest predictor of a clean referee re-review was whether the first resubmission closed every editor-flagged concern with an exact, already-present manuscript location, rather than spreading the fixes across the two resubmission rounds Nature Communications allows.

Check whether your Nature Communications revision is re-review ready

If a Nature Communications revision is rejected after re-review, the cascade depends on what the referees and editor cited.

Communications journals (Communications Biology, Communications Medicine, Communications Chemistry, Communications Physics, Communications Earth & Environment) are the natural Nature Portfolio open-access cascade because the publisher supports manuscript transfer with referee reports preserved, and the documented revision history travels with the paper.

Scientific Reports is the Nature Portfolio soundness-based cascade for technically sound work that does not need a cross-disciplinary advance claim.

PNAS and Science Advances are external multidisciplinary cascades; reports do not transfer, but a documented Nature Communications revision strengthens a fresh submission.

This page was created from the public Nature Communications editorial-process documentation at nature.com/ncomms, the broader peer-review literature on major-revision handling and response-letter structure, and Manusights pre-submission and revision review experience with Nature Communications-targeted manuscripts. Source limitations: Nature Communications publishes the two-month revision-deadline mechanism, the submission-date-retention rule, the return-to-original-referees norm, and the two-resubmission limit, but it does not publish a journal-specific acceptance-after-major-revision rate. Any precise Nature Communications-specific revision-acceptance percentage is therefore not verifiable; the 60 to 80 percent figure above is a general cross-journal range, not a Nature Communications number, and Nature Communications is more selective than the journals that range describes. The named revision patterns are Manusights interpretation from pre-submission and revision review, not private Springer Nature records.