Nature Precedings and Scintilla

Nature has been busy diving into the "web 2.0".

Now it looks as if the folks at Natiure have two new projects for the science masses:

- Nature Precedings, a website where people can dump all their spare data, unpublished manuscripts, powerpoint slides, posters, images and where readers can leave comments and even vote on a submission (I think the voting sounds too corny). It looks as if there is minimal peer review. From the site:

Submissions are screened by our professional curation team for relevance and quality...

The focus is on biology, medicine, chemistry and earth sciences. As an example of the type of content found there, here was the latest item posted on the site:

Promoter regions of many neural- and nutrition-related genes have experienced positive selection during human evolution
Ralph Haygood et al.
Posted 19 June 2007

Interesting ... this might solve that dilemma about publishing negative data or large data sets that are of practical value even if the data itself is not insightful in and of itself (although many would say that in the proper hands such large data sets could be rendered insightful ...)

The second offering is Scintilla, another aggregator/social bookmarking site (wasn't Connotea and NatureNetworks enough?) I'm not sure what extra features Scintilla offers ... I'll have to play around with it (if I have the time).

Any comments, reviews or further explanations?

I do want to add one last comment - there is quite a bit of experimentation going on in how we communicate our scientific findings. We have the web, a powerful tool for communication, data management and information analysis. We want to share data, we want interaction. But how to achieve all this? Some ideas have succeeded and some have failed (I'll blog about this in the near future). I applaud Nature and other publishers for trying.

(HT: Corie Lok)

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The Nature Precedings is a good idea. I have thought for quite a while now that the biological science community needs a tool like the Physics Preprint server ArXiv. It will be interesting to see if any pre-publication data will be posted, and how that will affect the status quo of publication.

Nature is making a good effort at developing Web 2.0 tools for the life sciences, but they are a bit fragmented in their focus and integration of the different tools. I guess time will tell about how they will be adopted.

I've also developed a Web 2.0 tool for the life sciences. It's called JeffsBench. We have tried to integrate a lot of the same tools that Nature is using (i.e. social networking, social bookmarking, blogs, forums, etc.), but we put them all in one location with a slightly different interface.

Communication and information sharing among life scientists is very poor. Hopefully some of these new tools will help to improve it.

Curtis your link isn't good. PS Why did you name it after Jeff, Curtis?

By Acme Scientist (not verified) on 19 Jun 2007 #permalink

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 cant 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)

By Santosh Patnaik (not verified) on 21 Jun 2007 #permalink