Nature Precedings
June 10, 2007
Pedro has been involved in testing out Nature Precedings, which was just announced. The free pre-print server from Nature is one more step in the direction of opening up scientific publication (biological sciences as Pedro points out) to global review and discussion. Pedro writes
All documents are citable (have DOIs), are not peer-reviewed (in the formal sense) and are archived under a creative commons license (derivatives allowed). The site has the community features (tagging/commenting/rating/RSS feeds) that you would expect and that will hopefully allow for requesting and providing comments on early findings.
I am cautiously optimistic. There is still some form of cultural change required for the larger community to get involved in such projects, but with Nature and PLoS taking a leading role, there is hope. I do believe that for these efforts to be truly successful, Science needs to get involved as well.
Further reading:
Nascent
Continuing the open science conversation
The scientific conversation - Culture wars
Technorati Tags: Open Science, Peer Review, Publishing, Life Science, Nature Magazine
Posted by Deepak Singh | Filed Under Admin, Life Science, Open Science
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6 Responses to “Nature Precedings”
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[…] Nature Precedings ( business|bytes|genes|molecules) I am cautiously optimistic. There is still some form of cultural change required for the larger community to get involved in such projects, but with Nature and PLoS taking a leading role, there is hope. I do believe that for these efforts to be truly successful, Science needs to get involved as well. […]
[…] Nature Precedings is live […]
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 can’t go through all of them, and a few ‘bad’ 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)
I think there is some misunderstanding. The site Nature Precedings is for discussing pre-publication research (in the form of manuscripts, draft, lectures, posters, etc.) and no preprints. Preprint are already accepted papers previously published on line. Nature Precedings takes the idea after the successful experience of physics, adding the ranking system of blogs such as Technorati, Del.icio.us and Digg. As I see it, Nature Precedings will move future publications in a totally different manner, where feedback and community effort may give more precise answers to problems. By the way, it is a complementary tool no an alternative to conventional way of publishing.
[…] Some time ago, I mentioned Nature Precedings. Like PLoS One, Nature Precedings is a step towards a new world of Life Science publishing. What I really like is the ability to upload material like powerpoint presentations and other material, not just papers. Also, it is one of the better design Nature properties, and the Digg-like voting system is pretty darn good. Attila is right; the implementation has been well thought through. Will it succeed? I hope so. As Nature’s previous experiences, and PLoS One have shown, it is not easy. I must admit it makes me want to put up some presentations I have made, but with professional affiliations, etc, I can’t do it at this point. […]
[…] Let’s say you search for “Nature Precedings” in Google. My article is up near the top, so you might click on the link. When you get there, here is what you might see in the sidebar […]