The influential journal Nature has announced that it is enlarging yet again its publishing empire by launching a Web site, Nature Precedings, for informal discussions of preliminary research findings.
The new site, which will go live this week, will “make informal communications such as conference papers or presentations more widely available and enabling them to be formally cited,” said an editorial in the current issue of Nature. “This, in turn, allows them to solicit community feedback and establish priority over their results or ideas.”
The site will cover biomedicine, chemistry, and earth sciences – keeping away from the territory of the widely used physics preprint server, ArXiv.
Early reactions on academic blogs have ranged from one scientist calling the announcement “great news” to a librarian concerned that “Nature will now have rights to everything that grows out of that early-stage material.”–Lila Guterman
