Mario of Mario’s Entangled Bank blog discusses an article in Wired magazine about Nature Precedings. Mario higlights Wired’s criticisms of Precedings for its “controversial” title, and for offering to upload scientists’ “effluvia and detritus” that would never appear in a journal. To the contrary, he writes, the site (on which he has been a beta tester) states that it “provides a rapid way to disseminate emerging results and new theories, solicit opinions, and record the provenance of ideas.” From Mario’s post:

“In other words, contrary to detritus and effluvia, Nature Precedings will host research at the cutting edge, some of which may have errors in it that will be “corrected” with the collaborative efforts of the research bazaar. Most of the posted research will, however, be correct (after all, it is your reputation that is at stake) and it’s early pre-print disemination will only be of benefit to the scientific community at large. This basically also addresses the last paragraph, “There’s also a danger of errors being missed that would have been picked up in the peer review process”. On the contrary, the recent PLoS retraction (see Show me the code and Exemplary retraction of high profile paper) confirms what we all academic researchers already know, that the peer review process is far from being fool proof. A forum like Nature Precedings, or arXiv for that matter, aid in the peer review process by disseminating pre-print cutting edge research findings thus allowing errors to be caught early on."