Nature Precedings: a free preprint, poster and presentation sharing science service
Posted by attilachordash on June 20, 2007
Nature Precedings is “a free online service that enables researchers to rapidly share, discuss, and cite their early findings” launched on 18th June. I was really happy to be a beta tester, contribute and help to clear out some bugs. This line is from one of my mails 2 weeks before: “I find the idea of Nature Precedings the most advanced in 2007 on the academic Web.”
Well it is not the most advanced in the sense that it is based on a brand new idea (think about arXiv.org) but it is really advanced in realization, power range and timing as it is the product of the Natureplex, the web 2.5 flagship of mainstream science publishing. Also the poster/presentation uploading option seem quite new (correct me, if I am wrong). Posting posters and presentations is a good idea since a massive portion of scientific results is materialized only in the truly interactive poster/presentation form.
I strongly hope that Nature Precedings won’t be the cemetery of finally unpublished and rejected paper seeds (a working voting system and a focus on posters/presentation can balk this) but the first distribution point of essential science results.
Coverages on Nature Precedings:
Pierre said
Hi,
uploading your presentation was not new: it was already possible with slideshare.net. For example see: http://www.slideshare.net/tag/bioinformatics.
Pierre
Nanog said
advantage of SlideShare is possibility to watch presentation online without download in your computer,
but new NPG web 2.0 product specifically focused on science and probably it’s peer-reviewed (not sure), i mean there is an editor who confirm your presentation upload
Jean-Claude Bradley said
One scientist’s cemetery is another’s repository
Santosh Patnaik said
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)
business|bytes|genes|molecules said
[...] is one of the better design Nature properties, and the Digg-like voting system is pretty darn good. Attila is right; the implementation has been well thought through. Will it succeed? I hope so. As [...]