Advancing interdisciplinary knowledge for ocean sustainability

In August 2022 we launched the inaugural issue of a new Nature journal focused on our blue planet: npj Ocean Sustainability 1 .The opening issue highlighted the journal's intended role in sharing research, critically debating key challenges to achieving ocean sustainability, with its environmental and human dimensions, and advancing pathways to address them.In just 1 year, the journal's interdisciplinarity and solutionoriented nature have shone through and made it stand out among prestigious journals.Covered topics were diverse (Fig. 1), ranging from the challenges of seabed mining to the new agreement on marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction, to fisheries management, climate change impacts, global sciencepolicy interfaces, human connections with ocean spaces, and digital twins.Many papers address different ocean sectors simultaneously, integrating different disciplines and different dimensions of ocean sustainability challenges (e.g., biodiversity loss, pollution, over-exploitation of species).In this promising first year, accepted publications included 12 original research Articles, two Review articles, two Perspectives, and seven Comments (with c. 30 additional manuscripts under revision).These publications resulted from the collaborative work of 180 authors representing 30 countries worldwide (Fig. 2).Authorship was geographically widespread; yet only 20 authors (11%), hailing from 12 countries (40%) outside of established research hubs were involved (Fig. 2b).This underscores the importance of fostering greater participation from underrepresented parts of the world, which is part of our mission for the near future.As for gender equality, there was a balance between women (51%) and men (49%), and 70% of the lead authors were women (Fig. 2d).With a focus on representativeness and an inclusive spread of articles, the editorial team has also been revamped, with an expansion in both numbers and geographical representation (the earlier team was composed of 20 members, 85% of which were based in Europe, North America, and Australia).The journal now has two Editors-in-Chief, seven Associate Editors, 22 Board Members and two Managing Editors from 15 countries, with a third of the editors (33%) based in the Global South (in Brazil, China, Ghana, Malaysia, Nigeria, South Africa, Sri Lanka, and Trinidad and Tobago) (Fig. 2b), and a balanced gender distribution (58% women versus 42% men) (Fig. 2d).We will keep working further to improve representativeness from other regions in the editorial team (e.g., Southern Asia, Eastern Africa, Central America).Over this time, we received an increasing number of submissions, particularly in the last six months (Fig. 2e).Attention to npj Ocean Sustainability is growing as the journal has published globally relevant science on pertinent topics that received significant media attention over the past year.Deep seabed mining (DSM) is one such topic and the two pieces on DSM published in the journal are both in the top 5% of all research outputs ever scored by Altimetric (which aims to quantify online engagement with published research) with scores of 224 2 and www.nature.