Launch: Nature Precedings

Posted by Matt Jankowski

Jun 21

We’re pleased to announce the launch of Nature Precedings – a preprint server operated by Nature Publishing Group. thoughtbot has been involved as a product development partner since precedings was still in the concept stage. It’s been great to work with Timo, Nicole, Hilary, Tom and everyone else at Nature who are genuinely passionate about what they do and about wanting this project to succeed where past services have not. From the Precedings about page:

Nature Precedings is a place for researchers to share documents, including presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, and manuscripts. It provides a rapid way to disseminate emerging results and new theories, solicit opinions, and record the provenance of ideas. It also makes such material easy to archive, share and cite. The whole service is free of charge.

After having worked on the first two iterations of Nature Network, working on precedings has been interesting and has allowed us to learn a lot more about scientific publishing and what the roles of researchers and publishers are in the scientific process. For a project that seems pretty straightforward (you submit your manuscripts and some editors approve them), there’s actually some cool stuff going on from a technical perspective…

Future plans include an expanded submission API, mirroring submitted content to NPGs publishing partners, and more. Not only is it exciting to launch, but it’s exciting to have a launch that gets people talking…

Launch announcement on Nascent

Right from the beginning, Precedings was conceived not as an NPG-only project but as a collaborative endeavour to open up scientific communication. To that end, we’ll also be reaching out to other publishers in the weeks to come to ensure that this initiative works effectively alongside the existing journal publishing channel, which Precedings seeks to complement.

O’Reilly Radar

They are consistently the boldest and most innovative of publishers—and it’s so rare to see a market leader with Nature’s unparalleled reputation taking such risks. It’s truly inspiring.

David Weinberger

This is very cool. From CC to DOI, it hits all the right notes. Even the name is good. And because Nature is one of the most important research journals around, this is a big deal.

Slashdot: Faster and Open Access to Scientific Results

In Nature Precedings, all content is released under a Creative Commons Attribution License, and can be commented and voted on. The service will cover research in biology, chemistry, and earth science, much like arXiv.org does for physics, mathematics, and computer science.

Comments on this post

Santosh Patnaik

Jun 28

Santosh Patnaik said,

Nature Precedings needs to have a good rating system for open, community-based review to work well. Currently, submitted articles can be voted for, but that does not tell one how many would have voted against it. Nor does one get to know the negative points unless they go through the whole article themselves. Such negative points may have been mentioned in some comments but they are not easy to spot. Further, one is usually disinclined to write textual comments unless one has a strong interest to do so.

With open preprint systems, being able to find useful and reliable ideas and data in articles is perhaps more important than being able to submit one. This becomes apparent as the number of articles increase, when searching can return hundreds and thousands of articles. One canￂﾒt go through all of them, and a few ￂﾑbadￂﾒ articles can easily cause frustration and distrust in the quality of the submissions.

But if search criteria can include objective measures of article quality, then one can indeed easily find valuable material. Nature Precedings should therefore opt for a point-based rating system where different aspects of articles can be appraised.

Thus, instead of just letting one vote for an article, one should be allowed to rate its different aspects on, say, a 1-5 scale. Such aspects can include:

1. clarity 2. originality 3. novelty 4. presence and quality of experimental data 5. logical procession 6. depth 7. proper referencing

In effect, this would be a proper peer-review system.

The ratings, both their average and their spread, should be displayed alongside articles.

A good review/rating system will discourage submission of bad articles, build trust in the usability and reliability of content in Nature Precedings, and encourage quality submissions.

(similar comments posted elsewhere on the web by me)

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