Nature Precedings celebrates…
Nature Precedings is a free online service launched in 2007 enabling researchers in the life sciences to rapidly share, discuss and cite preliminary (unpublished) findings. One year later, we look at some of the highlights.
Written scientific communication still takes place primarily through peer-reviewed journals. Nature Precedings seeks to take advantage of new web technologies to provide complementary opportunities for more rapid, participative, and informal communication. Inspired by the long-term success of the preprint server arXiv.org in the physical sciences, the site endeavors to bring this type of service to researchers in biology, medicine, chemistry and the earth sciences. Nature Precedings was launched in June 2007 by Nature Publishing Group with support from several partner organizations: The British Library, EMBL (European Molecular Biology Laboratory), Science Commons, and the Wellcome Trust.
Over the past 12 months, scientists have posted hundreds of documents in bioinformatics, genetics, neuroscience, molecular cell biology and other life sciences. In keeping with its mission to facilitate rapid and unrestricted access to nascent scientific information, Nature Precedings hosts hundreds of preprint (unpublished and unreviewed) manuscripts and a smaller, but significant, number of conference posters and presentations. Entries are subject-tagged, searchable and citable, and are freely available to view, reuse and redistribute under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license. The site recently featured its 500th posted document: ‘Viral organization of human proteins’ by Stefan Wuchty of the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health.
“NPG has been delighted by the response from academic researchers and very encouraged by the use of Nature Precedings,” says Steven Inchcoombe, Managing Director of Nature Publishing Group, said. “Initiatives such as Nature Precedings are an example of our commitment to the advancement of science, the evolution of science publishing, and more specifically to making the most of new technologies and new business models to facilitate and fund scientific communication. We hope that Nature Precedings will continue to encourage innovation in scientific fields and help researchers to communicate and share their work widely.”
By promoting the rapid and open exchange of scientific information, the site ultimately aims to help accelerate the pace of discovery. Documents are openly available within days in their original form, thereby allowing researchers to claim priority for their results immediately. Posting on the site does not necessarily preclude later publication in peer-reviewed journals, with a growing number of journals and publishers allowing preprint posting. A number of preprint manuscripts posted to the site have subsequently been published in journals after undergoing editorial review and peer-review. An example of how the site can be used to claim priority is ‘Transient-mediated fate determination in a transcriptional circuit of HIV’ by Leor Weinberger et al. A preprint version of the manuscript was posted on Nature Precedings on October 1, 2007, and then later formally published in Nature Genetics on March 16, 2008. The site also allows researchers to receive rapid feedback on manuscript drafts from peers. After posting their manuscript, ‘Towards a cognitive definition of colour vision’, Peter Skorupski and Lars Chittka have received comments from several unaffiliated scientists and have been able to discuss some of the points in the paper prior to publication.
Nature Precedings continues to evolve in terms of functionality and features. Recently the site launched a new feature allowing for the creation of document collections. The Allen Brain Atlas project has created a collection of reports on Nature Precedings, looking at the gene expression profiles of key regions in the mammalian brain. Other groups have taken advantage of Nature Precedings to archive and share non-traditional forms of communication. For example, speakers from the Second Nature Lecture Series, an ongoing series of free events in virtual world Second Life featuring presentations by scientists of various disciplines, are also posting their presentations in a collection on the site for archiving and reference.
Other features on the site launched over the past year include integration with Nature Network, a new XML-based API (using OAI-PMH), comment notifications, watermarking of PDFs, and a document preview feature. This month also marks the release of a new Flash-based viewer that will enable the viewing and sharing of presentations.
Documents on Nature Precedings are now indexed by eight academic search engines, including Google Scholar, Scirus, Scientific Commons, and BASE. Nature Network also hosts a lively forum for discussing issues related to Nature Precedings and, more generally, preprint posting and distribution.
The steady increase in the number of documents posted on the site, in conjunction with increased site visitors and discussion, suggests that there is much to look forward to in the upcoming year. The site continues to be actively developed and enhanced in response to researcher feedback. “We look forward to continuing to foster collaboration and openness, particularly in the biomedical sciences” said Timo Hannay, Publishing Director, Nature.com.
For those interested in finding out more, a number of editorials published over the past year have discussed the role of Nature Precedings in scientific communication: ‘Birthday Precedings’ (Nature Cell Biology, June 2008), ‘Virtual networking for microbiologists’ (Nature Reviews Microbiology, June 2008), ‘Shared Genomes’ (Nature, December 2007), ‘Community service’ (Nature, June 2007), and ‘Free Market Science’ (Nature Cell Biology, June 2007).