Nature Precedings has a rocking start

June 24, 2007

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.

Jean-Claude thinks it rocks!!!

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Posted by Deepak Singh | Filed Under Admin, Open Science 

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    Incidentally, these guys, who I also know personally (name drop OMG), did most of the technical development. I'm sure they'd be happy to answer questions about it, if you have any.
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    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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