Nature Precedings
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nature Precedings is a free, electronic publication for preprints, reporting scholarly work in the fields of biomedical sciences, chemistry, and earth sciences. It is published by the Nature Publishing Group that publishes Nature and other scientific journals.
Contents |
[edit] Objectives
Like other preprint systems, Nature Precedings is a place for scientists to convey their scientific ideas and observations for scientific progress, soliciting criticism, recording provenance of ideas, etc.
[edit] History
Nature Precedings was started in June 2007 by the Nature Publishing Group under the direction of Dr. Timo Hannay, its director for web publishing. The British Library, the European Bioinformatics Institute, Science Commons, and the Wellcome Trust provide partnership.[1]
[edit] Access
Access to Nature Precedings content is free (open access), and through the internet. Content, sub-categorized into 'manuscripts' and 'posters/presentations,' can be browsed, searched against, commented on and rated on the Precedings website. Commenting or rating requires registering (free) on the main Nature website. Subject-based RSS web feeds and e-mail alerting services are available for free subscription. Efforts are underway to mirror content on other websites.[1]
[edit] Coverage by academic search engines
| Cover | Do not cover |
|
[edit] Metadata harvesting
Nature Precedings supports the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting protocol (OAI-PMH, version 2) for metadata harvesting.[2]
[edit] License
Nature Precedings content, though solely author-copyrighted, can be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, version 2.5.
[edit] Submissions
Documents that are manuscripts, preliminary reports, white papers, or presentations reporting work in the fields of biology, chemistry, earth sciences, or medicine (except clinical trials) can be submitted for posting free of cost. Physics and mathematics are excluded as they are already covered by the globally well-established arXiv preprint server. Registration (free) on the main Nature site is required for submitting documents. The documents are expected to be of high-quality, and should be in PDF, Powerpoint or Microsoft Word format.
Submissions can be revised after posting, although the original submission remains as such and revisions are made available for access as newer versions.
[edit] Acceptance of submissions and peer review
Submitted documents are not reviewed by editors or experts, and 'genuine contributions from qualified scientists'[1] are accepted for immediate posting. Non-scientific or pseudo-scientific work is rejected. Submitters are expected to have copyrights and appropriate permissions for material presented in the submitted documents.
Posting of documents as preprints may or may not disqualify them, or the information presented in them, from being published in traditional journals[3].
Opportunity for non-anonymous, informal peer review is available through a commenting system on the Nature Precedings website. Plans are underway to implement an objective, multi-point rating system to assess different aspects of articles (such as novelty and adequacy of experimental data)[4].
[edit] Citing
A Nature Precedings preprint is cited like a traditional journal article. However, the preprint's DOI is used as the document identifier instead of journal volume, issue and page numbers.
[edit] Growth
55 preprints were posted in the first 15 days of Nature Precedings. Of these, 26 were submitted as manuscripts and 29 as posters/presentations[5]. Corresponding numbers for the first 50 days are 89, 48 and 41, and for the first six months, 303, 227 and 76.
[edit] Coverage of content in popular media
Besides being blogged about, the content of Nature Precedings articles occasionally gets reported in the popular media. An example is this Fox News report.
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ a b c "About Nature Precedings", Nature Precedings; accessed July 3, 2007
- ^ "OAI-PMH interface for Nature Precedings"
- ^ Nature Precedings forum; accessed July 3, 2007
- ^ Nature Precedings forum; accessed July 3, 2007
- ^ Nature Precedings search; searched July 3, 2007
