Nature Precedings, the new online service that allows scientists to publish unpublished manuscripts, conference papers and presentations onto a central repository has been warmly welcomed by The Cluetrain Manifesto author David Weinberger, but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 place to reveal papers before they are reviewed and published in journals, which he describes in an open email to the scientific information community as "relatively slow and expensive".
He 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."
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