Collections on Nature Precedings

OK, so I’ve been living under a rock, but Nature Precedings has this concept of collections which is pretty neat.  A couple that caught my eye

• iEvoBio
• The future of the web for collaborative science

This, coupled with some great blog posts on data analysis coming from various, non-hard science sources got me thinking.  Let’s say I am an independent researcher, and I have some cool science on hand (doesn’t have to be computational).  I can write it up and submit it to a journal.  Or I might have an opinion which I could write up and submit.  Today, we have a multitude of options about getting it out there.  What’s going to be interesting is what options we choose to get our thoughts out there.  Take Carl Boettiger’s deck on his experiments with open science.  That was posted to Precedings.  It could also have been cross-posted to slideshare or scribd.  Carl could have blogged his thoughts (expanding on the slides) and also embedded one of the slide shows.  And, nothing stops you from writing this up as an opinion paper.  The point is that we have avenues that we never had before.  What’s going to be interesting is how formal we get about all this?  Some material needs to go into Peer Review, but what happens if you blog about some of your initial results first, or maintain an open notebook.  How will it be treated?  What are the implications?

The answers are not black and white, and still in flux, but I’d encourage both scientists and publishers (and funding agencies) to rethink the current formalisms for making information available.  My hope is we’ll come up with our own set of guidelines on when, how and where without constraining creativity too much.