| Nature Precedings | |
|---|---|
| Discipline | Interdisciplinary |
| Language | English |
| Publication details | |
| Publisher | Nature Publishing Group (United Kingdom) |
| Publication history | 2007–present |
| Indexing | |
| ISSN | 1756-0357 |
| Links | |
Nature Precedings is an open access electronic preprint repository of scholarly work in the fields of biomedical sciences, chemistry, and earth sciences. Submissions to Nature Precedings are not peer reviewed. The content is curated and developed by the Nature Publishing Group, publishers of the journal Nature and other scientific journals.
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Nature Precedings was started in June 2007 by the Nature Publishing Group under the direction of Timo Hannay, its director for web publishing. The British Library, the European Bioinformatics Institute, Science Commons, and the Wellcome Trust are partners.[1] Nature Precedings supports the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH, version 2).[2] Although content is solely author-copyrighted, it can be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, versions 2.5 or 3.0.
Documents that are manuscripts, preliminary reports, white papers, or presentations reporting work in the fields of biology, chemistry, earth sciences, or medicine (except clinical trial results) can be submitted for posting. Physics and mathematics are excluded as they are already covered by the arXiv preprint server. Submissions can be revised after posting, although the original submission remains as such and revisions are made available for access as newer versions. 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. Opportunity for non-anonymous, informal peer review is available through a commenting system on the Nature Precedings website.
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. Scientists and journal publishers have expressed concerns regarding preprint submissions to Nature Precedings and whether these submissions would lead to violations of the Ingelfinger Rule, a policy in which journals will not publish a manuscript if its findings have been reported elsewhere.[3] Posting of documents as preprints may disqualify them, or the information presented in them, from being published in other journals.[4]
Fifty-five preprints were posted in the first 15 days of Nature Precedings. Of those, 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. About 500 and 650 preprints were respectively published during the first and second years. The growth of the repository can be tracked graphically on the Scientific Commons page for Nature Precedings.
Besides being blogged about, the content of Nature Precedings articles occasionally gets reported in the popular media. An example is this Fox News report.