June 18, 2007

Nature Precedings Now Open

Posted by Eric at 5:53 pm | Category: Links, Literature, News, Science

Physicists, computer scientists, and mathematicians have long had arXiv, which is an online pre-print archive for prepublication of manuscripts, and for discussions, editorials, and commentaries that wouldn’t be published elsewhere. I don’t know anywhere else where a Cosma Shalizi and William Tozier’s cheeky A Simple Model of the Evolution of Simple Models of Evolution essay would be published.

Now, biologists have sort of the same outlet. Nature Precedings (no, that is not a typo) has gone online, and it looks like there’s some interesting stuff already. Its interface is a little cluttered, but so far the site looks very promising. It’s almost like an amalgamation of arXiv, PLoS ONE, and Digg, in terms of the way things are presented and what can be done with them. I’ll be watching to see what happens.

(EDIT: added accidentally omitted co-author)

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9 Responses to “Nature Precedings Now Open”

  1. Cosma Says:
    June 18th, 2007 at 6:19 pm

    Thanks for the plug (I think), but I had a co-author. And we almost got it into Theoretical Population Biology, too.

  2. Eric Says:
    June 19th, 2007 at 2:03 am

    Thanks for letting me know about the omission. And yes, I quite enjoyed the article. That was how I first found your notebooks.

  3. Apollo Says:
    June 20th, 2007 at 11:36 am

    Neat idea!

  4. Santosh Patnaik Says:
    June 21st, 2007 at 3:30 pm

    Nature Precedings needs to have a good rating system for open, community-based review to work well. Currently, submitted articles can be voted for, but that does not tell one how many would have voted against it. Nor does one get to know the negative points unless they go through the whole article themselves. Such negative points may have been mentioned in some comments but they are not easy to spot. Further, one is usually disinclined to write textual comments unless one has a strong interest to do so.

    With open preprint systems, being able to find useful and reliable ideas and data in articles is perhaps more important than being able to submit one. This becomes apparent as the number of articles increase, when searching can return hundreds and thousands of articles. One can’t go through all of them, and a few ‘bad’ articles can easily cause frustration and distrust in the quality of the submissions.

    But if search criteria can include objective measures of article quality, then one can indeed easily find valuable material. Nature Precedings should therefore opt for a point-based rating system where different aspects of articles can be appraised.

    Thus, instead of just letting one vote for an article, one should be allowed to rate its different aspects on, say, a 1-5 scale. Such aspects can include:

    1. clarity
    2. originality
    3. novelty
    4. presence and quality of experimental data
    5. logical procession
    6. depth
    7. proper referencing

    In effect, this would be a proper peer-review system.

    The ratings, both their average and their spread, should be displayed alongside articles.

    A good review/rating system will discourage submission of bad articles, build trust in the usability and reliability of content in Nature Precedings, and encourage quality submissions.

    (similar comments posted elsewhere on the web by me)

  5. Eric Says:
    June 22nd, 2007 at 4:09 am

    Perhaps, perhaps not. I think such a rating system might be overly complicated for a goal as conceptually simple as a pre-print system. After all, the main point is not that all the content will be high-quality, but that there is an easy-to-use central collection which can be cited, referred to, and discussed. Pre-publication is more, I think, a means to collaboration and data-sharing, and not an end itself. Promoting quality pre-publications, while an admirable pursuit in another context, is counter-productive here, since it raises the barrier of entry for casual data sharing and collaboration.

    For the promotion of higher quality literature with a more open “rating” system, there is another initiative on the internet: PLoS ONE. There’s also the Faculty of 1000.

    Just look at arXiv; it has hundreds of submissions a day, and it is doing quite well as a pre-print archive for physics, mathematics, and computer science, even without a rating system.

  6. Nature Precedings [A Blog Around The Clock] · New York Articles Says:
    June 25th, 2007 at 7:05 pm

    [...] Clarence Fisher, David Weinberger, AJC, Euan Edie, Tim O’Reilly, Dean Giustini, Peta Hopkins, Eric, mrees, Sally Wyman, Michael Jubb, Alex Palazzo, Marie, Corie Lok, Attila Csordas, Ben Vershbow, [...]

  7. Nature Precedings [A Blog Around The Clock] | Cole Blog Network dot com Says:
    June 26th, 2007 at 2:43 am

    [...] Clarence Fisher, David Weinberger, AJC, Euan Edie, Tim O’Reilly, Dean Giustini, Peta Hopkins, Eric, mrees, Sally Wyman, Michael Jubb, Alex Palazzo, Marie, Corie Lok, Attila Csordas, Ben Vershbow, [...]

  8. Nature Precedings [A Blog Around The Clock] · Articles Says:
    June 29th, 2007 at 1:29 pm

    [...] Clarence Fisher, David Weinberger, AJC, Euan Edie, Tim O’Reilly, Dean Giustini, Peta Hopkins, Eric, mrees, Sally Wyman, Michael Jubb, Alex Palazzo, Marie, Corie Lok, Attila Csordas, Ben Vershbow, [...]

  9. Bill Tozier Says:
    July 7th, 2007 at 7:32 am

    Cheeky, are we? Here I thought we were being mean in public to famous people we worked with who took themselves too seriously.

    Ah, right.

    We thought about Journal of Irreproducible Results for a bit, and decided it would be too specialized and abstruse for that general-purpose publication.

    On a serious note: Given the number of readers of a really open archive, with all their diverse backgrounds and values, I wonder if a general digg-like karma-like system for rating contributions is better. Crowds have trouble defining their terms. They’re not, in my experience, made to separate planning out a formal ontological framework with which to discuss something (like Santosh’s 7-dimensional scheme), and then sticking with it for every exemplar.

    Given my experience with traditional credentialled peer-review (on both sides of the MSS), academicians aren’t very good at it, either….

    As a rule of thumb, I find when designing systems like this that allowing diversity to drive emergent classification helps quite a bit.

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