Nature Precedings is live
Our new preprint server and document-sharing service, Nature Precedings is now live, so please go and give it a try.
For background info, have a look at the O'Reilly Radar, where Tim has been kind enough to post an overview that I sent out earlier today.
One thing that we've already added since then (i.e., this afternoon) is a 'bridge' from our journal manuscript submission system to Nature Precedings. This allows NPG authors to submit their manuscripts for immediate pre-publication in Nature Precedings while they are being considered by the relevant journal. It's heartening to see people already beginning to use this (though as I write the system is misbehaving — please hang on in there while we get it fixed).
I'm gathering coverage of Nature Precedings in Connotea. There have been some unfounded initial concerns that Nature will have some special rights to the content, or that we'll be charging for some aspect of the service. On the contrary, all the content is released under the Creative Commons Attribution License and the service is free to authors and readers. In fact we're working with some of our partners to mirror the content to ensure it's long-term free availability (whatever might happen to Nature Publishing Group).
And what a great list of partners they are: the British Library, the European Bioinformatics Institute, Science Commons, and the Wellcome Trust. See our press release for their statements about the project.
We expect to add one or two more partners in the not-too-distant future, and convene a group of forward-thinking senior scientists to advise us on future development of the service. 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.
If you've got comment, please post it below, go to the Nature Precedings Group on Nature Network, or write to precedings-at-nature-dot.com.
Comments
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 cant 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)
Posted by: Santosh Patnaik | June 21, 2007 03:54 PM
The impact factor , peer review and rating are very much required, otherwise it will not get recognition scientifically.
Posted by: Dr. M. K. Rajput | November 29, 2007 06:34 AM