June 11, 2007
'Nature' Starts New Site for Early Research Findings
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
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The concern that Nature will have any special rights over the content that appears in Nature Precedings (or whatever subsequently emerges from it) is misplaced. We won’t — wait and see.
— Timo Hannay Jun 12, 07:22 AM #
And how much will this cost? Knowing Nature it won’t be free or cheap.
— Paul Rittelmeyer Jun 13, 01:26 PM #
Actually, it’s completely free. There’ll be a formal announcement about Nature Precedings on Monday that will tell all.
— annette thomas Jun 16, 03:47 AM #
Nature Precedings needs to have a good rating system:
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)
— Santosh Patnaik Jun 21, 03:51 PM #