Nature Precedings

Yan — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 13:26:33 -0700

自然出版社又发布了一个新网站：Nature Precedings，a place for researchers to share pre-publication research, unpublished manuscripts, presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, and other scientific documents. 类似物理科学领域的 arXiv。

The traditional way for scientists to share their research results is through journals. These have the benefit of being peer-reviewed, citable and archival, but as a communication channel they are also relatively slow and expensive. As a complement to this, scientists also use more immediate and informal approaches, such as preprints (i.e., unpublished manuscripts), conference papers and presentations. The trouble is, these usually aren't 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).

Nature Precedings is trying to overcome those limitations by giving researchers a place to post documents such as preprints and presentations in a way that makes them globally visible and citable. Submissions are filtered by a team of curators to weed out obviously inappropriate material, but there's no peer-review so accepted contributions appear online very quickly -- usually within a couple of hours. The content is all released under a Creative Commons Attribution License, and each item is made citable using a DOI or Handle (the same systems used for peer-reviewed scholarly papers).

A similar approach has long been the norm in physics, where the the arXiv.org preprint server at Cornell provides an indispensible source of up-to-the-minute reports (the main reason that Nature Precedings doesn't attempt to cover physics). We're hoping to catalyse a similar degree of openness and cooperation among researchers in other disciplines. Because Nature Precedings isn't peer-reviewed (to be more accurate, the submissions are subjected to open review *after* their release, through user comments and votes), we see it as complementing rather than competing with traditional journals, just as arXiv.org operates alongside the peer-reviewed journals in physics.

The service is free to authors and readers alike.

网络与科学

Scintilla

Yan — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 13:20:45 -0700

继 Postgenomic, Connotea, 和 Nature Network 之后，自然出版社又推出一个新的 Web 2.0 服务，Scintilla。Scintilla（火花）基本上是个新闻/blog/论文聚合器，不过它还有评分、推荐等功能。有了各种 rss reader，digg 之后，不知道还有谁愿意转而用这个服务。Scintilla 是用 drupal 建的，Nature 做了一些 core hacks，和几个定制模块。

网络与科学

Nature Network

Yan — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 10:23:59 -0800

自然出版社最近升级了它们的 Nature Network，一个面向科学家们的社会性软件。我去注册了一下。但似乎没什么人活动，不是很好玩（虽然潜在很有趣），就跟格志一样。: ( 无论如何，我在上面建了一个群组，叫Ge Zhi，呵呵。

自然出版社在把 Web 2.0 的技术和理念运用到科学领域这个方面，比较前卫，有很多尝试，但是人气都不是很高，估计也比较无奈。

网络与科学