| Nature goes open preprint!
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Nature magazine has set up a site — Precedings — where scientists can post their papers before those papers are reviewed and accepted. This a big deal. As Nature's Timo Hannay puts it in a broadcast email:
The traditional way for scientists to share their research results is through journals. These have the benefit of being peer-reviewed, citable and archival, but as a communication channel they are also relatively slow and expensive. As a complement to this, scientists also use more immediate and informal approaches, such as preprints (i.e., unpublished manuscripts), conference papers and presentations. The trouble is, these usually aren'teasy to share in a truly globally way (most repositories are institution- or funder-specific), and you can't formally cite them (which is important because citation underlies the scientific credit system).
Nature Precedings is trying to overcome those limitations by giving researchers a place to post documents such as preprints and presentations in a way that makes them globally visible and citable. Submissions are filtered by a team of curators to weed out obviously inappropriate material, but there's no peer-review so accepted contributions appear online very quickly — usually within a couple of hours. The content is all released under a Creative Commons Attribution License, and each item is made citable using a DOI or Handle (the same systems used for peer-reviewed scholarly papers).
Timo goes on to acknowledge that arXiv has done this for physics and other disciplines.
This is very cool. From CC to DOI, it hits all the right notes. Even the name is good. And because Nature is one of the most important research journals around, this is a big deal. [Tags: nature science research everything_is_miscellaneous knowledge arxiv precedings cc ]
Posted
by D. Weinberger at June 18, 2007 09:17 AM
Comments
I'm curious about why you are so enthusiastic, given that many such services already exist -- along with arXiv.org and other disciplinary pre-print servers, there are a large and growing number of university-based repositories (using DSpace, Fedora, Greenstone, EPrints, and other software).
Contrary to what Timo Hannay says, these repositories' content *is* easy to share globally, since most are open to anyone with an internet connection, and contents turn up high in web search results. Moreover, they *can* be cited, precisely as Precedings material will be, via a stable handle, URI, or DOI for each object. Many also use CC licenses.
It looks to me as if Nature is jumping on a bandwagon built by university libraries and scholars, and disingenuously claiming that their service is better. They have their undoubtedly high reputation to attract attention to their efforts, but how is Precedings genuinely distinct from hundreds of other digital preprint repositories?
Perhaps the Nature brand alone will make the difference. It will be interesting to see how scholars make use of this, since university-based repositories have not been heavily used as yet.
Posted by: Monica McCormick | June 18, 2007 05:38 PM
This is an interesting development. A professor at the university where I am studying recently told me that it is the pinnacle of success for an academic to be published in Nature. Of the many, many submissions they receive, they only review about 5% for possible publication, and only a small percentage of those will actually ever be published. So it is even an honour to receive a rejection slip from them, since it means your article was one of the 5%.
Apparently, it can also take anything up to 2 years from date of acceptance to publication. In some of our fast moving fields, by that time, the material would long since be obsolete.
So I'm wondering how these two factors will eb impacted by this development.
Posted by: Karyn Romeis | June 18, 2007 06:23 PM
Monica, it is the jumping on the bandwagon that makes this a big deal, imo. When one of the premier journals does this, it signals a new level of acceptance. Your final paragraph points to another good reason to think this is a big deal.
Posted by: David Weinberger | June 18, 2007 11:51 PM
Hi Dave - thanks for the link. I think this is an important development for scholarship to advance beyond the limitations of expert-only peer review. You might be interested in an article I posted in march on Scholarship in an Age of Participation: http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/journal.htm
Take care
George
Posted by: George Siemens | June 19, 2007 10:20 AM
I'm very excited about the step--an advance for transparency and access in academia--but I'm also afraid the media will abuse it. The public already takes differing scientific interpretations as reason to eschew discoveries. Will they understand the answer, "but it hasn't been peer reviewed yet" when their local daily tries to scoop a finding? Will the daily even mention that it hasn't been reviewed? There's already so much terrible science reporting b/c media doesn't get into the culture of journals. Last spring's report of cerebral hemorrhages in newborns (conducted by a radiology journal) was a great example. There were no developmental peers, but it was reported as if it had developmental significance.
Posted by: anniem | June 23, 2007 01:04 PM
Regarding the first comment: Unlike most preprint systems (of universities, funding organiations, etc.), Nature Precedings has an accessible community review system. That makes it a better preprint system.
But, the review system at Nature Precedings (currently, only 'yes' votes and comments) needs to be improved. I have posted about it on the Nature Precedings forum - http://network.nature.com/forums/precedings/234
Posted by: Santosh Patnaik | June 23, 2007 04:10 PM