Nature Masterclasses has been developed by Nature Research to provide professional development training for researchers. Nature Research is part of Springer Nature, a leading academic and educational publisher. Nature Research's flagship publication is Nature, a weekly multidisciplinary journal first published in 1869.

Nature Masterclasses began as a provider of scientific writing and publishing training — drawing on the expertise of Nature Portfolio journal editors. We expanded our training by launching two more online courses, Focus on Peer Review in 2016, and Effective Collaboration in Research, 2019. Our online offering grew further in 2020, with two new courses, Managing Research Data to Unlock its Full Potential and Narrative Tools for Researchers. To-date, over 50,000 researchers from over 180 countries have benefited from our training.