About Nature Precedings

• Introduction
• News and Updates
• Browsing, searching and alerting
• Submissions
• Criteria for posting
• Submissions to journals
• Copyright, citation and DOIs
• Archiving
• Privacy policy
• Management
• Contact us

Introduction

Nature Precedings is a permanent, citable archive for pre-publication research and preliminary findings. It is a place for researchers to share documents, including presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, and non-peer-reviewed manuscripts. It provides a rapid way to disseminate emerging results and new theories, solicit opinions, and record the provenance of ideas. It also makes such material easy to archive, share and cite.

News and Updates

Nature Precedings: Back to the Source - Outsell EPS Insights (18 June 2007)

"Nature Publishing Group is launching Nature Precedings, a new free online service, which will enable researchers to share, discuss, and cite their early findings prior to publication".
Download the PDF

Browsing, searching and alerting

Nature Precedings allows for browsing and searching to help quickly locate the information of most interest to you. Use the Browse by subject page to drill down to content by subject area and 'tag' (author- or curator-assigned keyword).

If you are looking for something specific, use the search box at the top of the home page, or the Detailed search page, to locate relevant documents.

Each subject area has an associated email alert. Click on the relevant 'letter' icon () on the home page. Each subject area also has an associated web feed (also known as an RSS feed) that allows you to be automatically alerted to new submissions. Look out for the distinctive orange icons (). To find out more about web feeds, see the Nature.com web feeds page.

You are not required to register in order to browse Nature Precedings, search the archive, retrieve content, or use our web feeds. In order to receive email alerts, you are required to have a Nature.com registration, but creating one is quick and free of charge.

Submissions

You can post documents to Nature Precedings by using the submission form.

New submissions are screened by our curation team to ensure appropriate content. They are not subjected to editorial or peer review for quality or significance. Assuming they satisfy our criteria (see below), submissions are posted online immediately. The delay between submission and posting is usually no more than one working day, often much less. We currently accept manuscripts, posters, or presentations in the following file types:

• PDF
• Word (.doc)
• PowerPoint (.ppt)

Documents not submitted as PDFs are converted to PDF for the purposes of archiving and to ensure that readers can view them on most types of computer. The originally submitted file is also made available to readers who wish to view that format.

Please note that since Nature Precedings functions as a permanent, citable archive, documents cannot be removed once posted.

Criteria for posting

We will post submissions in most areas of biomedicine, chemistry and the earth sciences. (View the full subject list.) In particular, we will not post submissions describing the results of clinical trials or those making specific therapeutic claims. (More general claims, for example that a certain line of basic research may have clinical potential, are usually acceptable.) The reason for excluding such material is that Nature Precedings content is not peer-reviewed, and the consequences of potential misunderstandings or misinformation are obviously more serious in clinical medicine than in other fields.

Once again, Nature Precedings content is not peer reviewed. This service is intended to provide a more rapid and informal communication system than that enabled by scientific journals, and in this sense is complementary to them. Many of the findings you read here may be preliminary or speculative, and remain to be confirmed. Please bear this in mind when deciding how seriously to take them.

We will not post submissions from fields in the physical sciences that are are already well served by preprint servers such as arXiv.org.

Content that we consider to be non-scientific or pseudoscientific will not be posted. We will only post genuine contributions from qualified scientists. This will usually require submitters to have a recognised academic affiliation.

Incomplete submissions will not be posted. This is a free service, so please help us to help you by completing all relevant sections of the submission form.

Unfortunately we cannot post submissions that have previously been published in a journal or have been accepted for publication. Post-print maunscripts should be deposited in a post-print archive (like PubMed Central) in accordance with the publishing journal’s policies. Nature Precedings will consider posting original or prior versions of manuscripts accepted for publication, however this should be noted with the submission.

Submissions to journals

Nature Precedings hosts manuscripts that may be submitted to any journal of any publisher. Nature and all Nature journals have a policy that permits such posts on recognized pre- or e-print servers such as Nature Precedings and arXiv without affecting their eligibility for publication, whether or not such postings result in discussion on other sites and in the media. We cannot take responsibility for the possibility of scooping by competitors. Authors submitting to other journals are advised to check their policies about prior postings before sending manuscripts to Nature Precedings.

Copyright, citation and DOIs

You should only submit material to Nature Precedings if you own the copyright (which will usually mean that you wrote it) and have the permission of any other copyright holders (e.g., in the case of a co-authored piece of work, the other authors). If you are uploading a presentation then please take particular care that none of your slides contain material for which you do not own the copyright.

Copyright for all documents here remains with the author(s). Others may make use of the material under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 or 3.0 License. (Please check the relevant document information page for the license information.) 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. A suggested format for citation is:

Other, A. N. Document title. Available from Nature Precedings <http://dx.doi.org/10.5555/npre.2007.223.1> (2006).

Note that most items posted on Nature Precedings are assigned a DOI (or Digital Object Identifier). This is a permanent, unique identifier for that document and should therefore be used when citing it. DOIs also allow the document to be located online by using a URL of the form http://dx.doi.org/[DOI]. This will automatically redirect you to the correct URL for that document and will continue to work even if the online location of the document should change.

In a few cases we assign a different type of identifier, known as a Handle. This is because CrossRef, the publishing industry body that coordinates use of DOIs for citation purposes, does not permit DOIs to be assigned to a preprint (i.e., a document submitted with a view to eventually sending a revised version for publication in a journal). Handles can be identified by their 'hdl:' prefix. They are related to DOIs and work in a very similar way (technically, DOIs are just special instance of Handles). To turn a Handle into a URL, use a URL of the form http://hdl.handle.net/[HANDLE]

Archiving

As well as making scientific documents citable, Nature Precedings also aims to make them globally available and stably archived.

To this end, we are in discussions with governmental, academic and not-for-profit organisations about providing mirror sites of Nature Precedings content. The plan is that if, for any reason, this content becomes unavailable from Nature Publishing Group, it will continue to be available through those sites. We will post more information about these initiatives as it becomes available.

As well as providing an efficient means to make your material available for others to access and cite, this also means that Nature Precedings is a convenient way to archive it for your own future convenience.

Privacy policy

Please see our Privacy Policy page.

Management

Nature Precedings is run by Nature Publishing Group (NPG). Nature Publishing Group is a trading name of Macmillan Publishers Ltd, and Nature America Inc., a wholly-owned US subsidiary of Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

Contact us

We welcome your questions, suggestions and comments. Please refer to our Contact page for details.