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Publishing companies tend to create many journals for different (sub-)communities and also numerous other reasons. Nature Research (the company) has next to Nature (its most well known journal) many smaller ones, like Nature Biotechnology, Nature Communications or in this case Scientific Reports. Some are well regarded (e.g. Nature Biotechnology, Nature Communications). Scientific Reports has a comparatively low impact factor, which has furthermore dropped every year in the last few years. Impact factor measures the average number of citations a published paper receives. Its impact factor of 4 is not very impressive. The main Nature journal has an IF of 41 (Nat Biotechnol has 35 and Nat Comm has 11).

In this article the patent applications are disclosed in the Competing Interests section. The readers can draw their own conclusions from those. It would be very unusual for a journal to not demand a declaration of conflicting interests.