Nature Precedings, the new online service that allows scientists to publish unpublished manuscripts, conference papers and presentations onto a central repository has been warmly welcomed by The Cluetrain Manifesto author David Weinberger, but some information professionals disagree.
Timo Hannay, director of web publishing at Nature describes Precedings...as a "complement" to journals. He believes the problem with pre-prints and conference papers is that they are not "easy to share in a truly globally way (most repositories are institution – or funder specific) and you can't formally cite them (which is important because citation underlies the scientific credit system)". With Precedings Nature aims to offer a central global repository where material is easily discovered and citable.
"This is very cool," Weinberger says on his blog. "From CC to DOI, it hits all the right notes." Because the service is from Nature, Weinberger believes the launch is a "big deal".
But Monica McCormick of North Carolina State University Library commenting disagrees, "why are you so enthusiastic… there are a large and growing number of university-based repositories". She believes that these repositories are easy to find and can be cited. "Nature is jumping on a bandwagon built by university libraries and scholars, and disingenuously claiming that their service is better. They have their undoubtedly high reputation to attract attention to their efforts, but how is Precedings genuinely distinct from hundreds of other digital pre-print repositories?
But Weinberger disagrees, "When one of the premier journals des this, it signals a new level of acceptance."
Comment. Weinberger and McCormick are both right. Nature's entry into OA archiving helps the cause: the more OA archives the better; the more OA content, the better; and the more journal support for OA archiving the better. But 900+ university and disciplinary archives led the way and their contents are exactly as citable as those in Nature Precedings.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/19/2007 09:17:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
