Publications whose staff sit back and wait for the world to come knocking on their door are likely to be short-lived. Nevertheless, Nature could easily fill its gradually increasing number of pages every week by being reactive rather than proactive. Events would happen and journalists would write about them; we would go on publishing the best of what we receive in the form of original papers, and News and Views authors would explain them.

But that philosophy would do less than justice to our readers, who deserve more by way of editorial initiative. Nature has never lacked proactivity. But this week sees two significant further steps in that spirit: the launches of the News Features and Nature Insight sections (see pages 538 and 631, respectively). Nature already aims to publish overviews that are authoritative, timely, dynamic and, above all, accessible. Our News Features represent an enhancement of our regular journalistic coverage that is intended to help meet this goal.

The Nature Insight section, to be published every month, will bring together a collection of articles covering many aspects of a timely subject, in the form of commentaries and review articles written by acclaimed scientists in the field. As the boundaries between disciplines are blurring — for example, with physicists trying to understand intricate details of cells and biologists modelling global signalling networks — there has never been a greater need to understand specialist issues across the expanse of biology and the physical sciences. Claiming to provide a one-stop shop on any subject would smack of hubris, but that is what we aspire to. The reviews are presented in a style designed for maximum clarity, with special attention to annotated schematics to aid understanding of the text, and boxes containing information for the specialist or background information for the general reader. Thus, in contrast to traditional review articles, we hope that these collections of overviews will entice readers not already closely involved in the area of research.

In this issue we have focused both the Nature Insight and the News Feature on the same topic. We hope readers will enjoy the complementarity of these approaches.