Nature's Controversial New Non-Journal: Bazaar, not Cathedral

The Nature Publishing Group has unveiled a website, Nature Precedings, devoted to the detritus of the scientific process -- not only unpublished manuscripts, but the assorted notes, presentations, white papers and other effluvia that would never appear in a journal, but could be useful for researchers.

Precedings is meant to be complementary to the formal peer-reviewed process of publishing, Hanny said. "We don't pretend that publishing in Precedings is the same as publishing in peer-reviewed journals," he said. "Scientists do have informal documents that they share with one another, at meetings and such. We want to give them an opportunity so that those documents -- the informal literature -- can be archived, made citable, and readily available."

The Scientist's discussion of Nature Precedings focused on issues surrounding non-peer reviewed materials -- namely, whether journals will favor novelty over substance and be reluctant to publish them later.

There's also a danger of errors being missed that would have been picked up in the peer review process (though Nature Precedings has sensibly declared itself off-limits to submissions involving therapies and clinical trials). But that seems an acceptable risk for making accessible to scientists the wealth of scientific materials generated during research, of which peer-reviewed journal articles are only the iceberg's tip. It's precisely this sort of informally sophisticated information sharing that Web 2.0 makes possible -- and while it might not revolutionize science, it could certainly give the engine a needed overhaul.

New site pits 'published' vs. 'posted' [The Scientist]