Nature Precedings

Nature, one of the world's most prestigious research magazines has opened a site called Nature Precedings. On this site, papers submitted by scientists are placed online, often within hours of being received, instead of taking the usual months to be reviewed and published.

Taken from the Precedings website:

"Nature Precedings is a place for researchers to share documents, including presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, and manuscripts. It provides a rapid way to disseminate emerging results and new theories, solicit opinions, and record the provenance of ideas. It also makes such material easy to archive, share and cite. The whole service is free of charge."

As an added bonus, everything is covered under a Creative Commons license.

This is huge. The latest information available in these fields, free online, constantly updated, available for use and review.

While not a source for my middle schoolers, it may be something that high school classes can use. More importantly, it serves as another precedent for the free and open dissemination of knowledge globally.

Thanks to David Weinberger.

technorati tags:nature, precedings, information, open, weinberger

Comments

[Santosh Patnaik]

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 can’t 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)