Nature Precedings, a pre-print server for biomedical research
It was hard to hold off from blogging about this but I can finally write about Nature Precedings, a new free service provided by the Nature Publishing Group. The official announcement is in this editorial:
"... this site will enable researchers to share, discuss and cite their early findings. It provides a lightly moderated and relatively informal channel for scientists to disseminate information, especially recent experimental results and emerging conclusions."
"...the site will host a wide range of research documents, including preprints, unpublished manuscripts, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, posters and presentations."
I have been participating in the beta for some months now and as it is mentioned in the editorial it will be openly available starting next week. All documents are citable (have DOIs), are not peer-reviewed (in the formal sense) and are archived under a creative commons license (derivatives allowed). The site has the community features (tagging/commenting/rating/RSS feeds) that you would expect and that will hopefully allow for requesting and providing comments on early findings. In summary an nicer version of ArXive for biomedical research.
I think this is great news that serves on one hand to improve access to research (open access by pre-print archiving) and increase the openness of research. This can provide a place for independent time-stamping of early findings and could be improved (hopefully with community feedback) until it is appropriate for formal submission to a peer-reviewed journal.
A framework for open science (in biology) can now go from blogs/wikis to pre-print server to peer-reviewed journals. Many ideas might die along the way and many collaborations might form by connecting early findings in an unexpected way.
Of course if you are in maths/physics you have arXive and you are probably wondering what is taking us biomedical researchers so long to get into this.
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Posted by Pedro Beltrão at 2:56 PM
Labels: open science, publishing
7 comments:
I'm curious, would pre-publishing be a problem for those journals with a "no prior publication" requirement for original research?
Most journals will consider a paper for publication even if they are available in a recognized preprint server. I compiled a list of policies about this a while ago (see here).
In any case it is a good idea to first have a look around the journal policies where the manuscript could be appropriate for , before sending it to a preprint server.
Nice to see this project emerging into the light of day. I've been hearing rumours of it for 6 months or more.
Do you know exactly which CC licence is being used on the material. I'm hoping it is the full 'by' licence as any of the standard restrictions inhibit the content's usefulness either directly or indirectly.
It is CC commercial and derivatives allowed. The only limitation is that source must be properly cited. From the about page of Nature Precedings:
"Copyright for all material published here remains with the author(s). Others may make use of the material under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. Simply put, this means that the content may be quoted, copied and disseminated for any purpose, but only if the original source is correctly cited."
That is great news. I checked with John Wilbanks and he believes that NPre will be using a 'BY' licence too. This will be a great statement about what Open Access really is.
Nature has been on an impressive streak recently with the preprint archiving service and Scintilla. In terms of open science or "science 2.0", they are demonstrating leadership well beyond most publishers.
Nature Publishing Group is also still very much part of a "copyright 1.0" corporation, Macmillan.
The tension between those promoting open access and those wanting to keep it behind firewalls.
Charkin, CEO of Macmillan, provides a clue to how serious this tension is. At the bookexpo recently, he chose to show his distaste for the open model, and those that promote it, by "stealing" Google laptops at the bookexpo.
Here is lessig on the Charkin affair
It will be interesting to see how these forces play out in coming years.
Jason: I agree with you on the tension between the two worlds. The web publishing group at Nature appears to be working in a mode of invent first monetize latter. They must have the backing of the main publish group because there is a considerable investment into the web team.
I have no idea about the money they might make from advertisement and payed user services that they might put in on top of the free stuff but I suspect that it would be enough to make their work profitable.
It is hard to know for know but at the moment they among the most innovative publishers and I think these efforts deserve support.
I just wish that more publishers got together into developing the platforms for online collaboration, comment systems, ways to evaluate the impact of a work, etc. Many of these things would be much better if they were accepted standards.
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