Calling all biologists: free market science
This month's Editorial in Nature Cell Biology (freely available at Nature Cell Biology 9, 721; 2007) explains to biologists the role of the preprint server, that mode of communication familiar to physicists, astronomers, astrophysicists and chemists. This post is an edited version of of the section of the Editorial about Nature Precedings, and how posting preprints and other documents to that site affects submission to Nature journals.
Nature Precedings aims to facilitate sharing and discussing prepublication data. Notably, the site hosts a diverse set of formats, including slide presentations, preprints, posters and stand-alone data. The postings are citable (DOIs) and attributable to an author, and although they are screened by in-house curators for scientific legitimacy (not novelty or quality), they are not peer reviewed. As a result, content can be posted in less than a day. The content carries a 'Creative Commons Attribution' licence, which requires only proper citation. The Nature journals, like many others, do not consider a posting on the site as a formal publication that would prevent consideration of a submitted manuscript for publication (but authors cannot post to Nature Precedings subsequent pre-accept versions that evolve due to the journal's editorial process).
A strong focus of Nature Precedings is on browsing, searching and alert functionality, with Web 2.0 features such as authored comments, voting, subject tagging and RSS feeds. No submission charge is levied and the long-term open availability of the content is guaranteed.
In essence, biologists are now getting a taste of what has been an integral part of the physical sciences community for decades in the form of preprint servers such as arXiv, now with more than 100,000 articles. Some will argue that Nature Precedings will provide poster presenters with global exposure and serve to 'time stamp' data and ideas, whereas others will feel that researchers in highly competitive areas will not gamble on such a wide exposure in the race to publication. After all, many big conferences already suffer from a dearth of unpublished data. However, there is good cause to be optimistic, as even traditionally secretive research areas, such as pharma-research, are occasionally opening up with laudable open-access projects such as Synaptic Leap — a site that facilitates sharing data on neglected tropical diseases. We are keen to hear your views.
