Faster and Open Access to Scientific Results

Tim O'Reilly has a post about how the prominent scholarly journal Nature has recently launched an open-access service for pre-publication research and presentations. In Nature Precedings, all content is released under a Creative Commons Attribution License, and can be commented and voted on. The service will cover research in biology, chemistry, and earth science, much like arXiv.org does for physics, mathematics, and computer science.

just the prepublications?

[pimpimpim]

Isn't that what Arxiv.org has been doing for ages already?

In germany there is an UNESCO backed project trying to open scientific information as a whole [open-access.net]

I personally would be glad if scientific publishing would open up. Of course, someone has to do the editorial work, but currently many journals actually dare to ask money for publishing with them, ask thousands of dollars for including color pictures, and to subscribe to them is not cheap as well. This unfortunately gives the smaller universities a huge disadvantage, even when the people working there might be very good. Also, I suggest that peer review gets some working through, by either always opening up the names of the reviewers, or anonymizing the article. As it is now, many articles get good or bad reviews based mainly on personal views, or on the fact that the reviewer wants to publish the same subject and has an interest in delaying it. With these things fixed, science would get a step in the right direction becoming the honest thing it should be.

is CS different?

[AnonymousCactus]

It's important to note that the primary way of relating new work in computer science is through peer-reviewed conference proceedings, which tend to be a bit faster. Is there a reason to use a service like this if you're a computer scientist?

Also, will people be concerned about releasing docs to something informal like this? There are already issues with people "stealing" ideas or perhaps arriving at the same idea independently. A service like this may make the distinction even harder to characterize. I've known people to scoop others by posting a tech report on their web page, which are incredibly difficult to search. This would at least make that better.

Needs better rating system

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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 articles' qualities, 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:

- clarity
- originality
- novelty
- presence and quality of experimental data
- logical procession
- depth
- 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.