Increasing ‘openness’ has become a guiding principle across the sciences, and particularly within neuroscience. Promoting open science can take many forms, including sharing of data and analysis software, transparent reporting of methodological details, and posting submitted manuscripts to preprint servers — and Nature Neuroscience has championed these initiatives. More recently, Nature Neuroscience and our sister journals in the Nature Portfolio have added an open access publishing option, and we are determined to make more of our content freely available to all and to enhance the visibility of the science that we publish.

To further develop this commitment to open science, Nature Neuroscience is now opening up our platform by publishing more opinion and commentary from the neuroscience community. Recognizing that our pages have a uniquely broad visibility among neuroscientists, we seek to shine a spotlight on issues and ideas of great interest and importance to our readers. These pieces can touch on anything related to the practice, politics, and culture of neuroscience, including emerging themes and technologies, research ethics, science policy, workplace issues, and more. We are especially interested in pieces that relate to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and we hope that this endeavor will enable us to amplify the voices of members of underrepresented communities.

Scientists are more connected now than ever, and can share their ideas quickly and widely on platforms such as Twitter. This is a positive development overall, as it allows diverse voices to be heard and raises our collective awareness of important issues and controversies. (Along these lines, please be sure to follow us at @NatureNeuro.) But it can be hard to tune out the noise in these spaces and concentrate on the truly constructive and thoughtful comments. To this end, we hope to provide a curated forum for original, substantive, and insightful discourse in our pages.

In addition to welcoming opinion pieces from the community, you also will be hearing more from us, the Nature Neuroscience editorial team. Beginning in this issue, we are publishing Research Highlights, in which we feature papers published in other journals that we find especially interesting. We also plan to share our own thoughts more often in the form of Editorials (and tweets, of course).

Please do get in touch if you have an idea or opinion that you would like to share with our readership. We look forward to hearing from you!