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Nature Proceedings

Resource: Nature Precedings
Takeaways: RSS Feed of Latest Postings from Precedings

Prepublication Service and Preliminary Findings:

"Nature Precedings is a free online service from NPG that enables researchers in the life sciences to openly share preliminary findings, solicit community feedback, and claim priority over discoveries by posting preprint manuscripts, white papers, technical reports, posters, and presentations."

General questions

What is Nature Precedings?

Nature Precedings is a permanent, citable archive for pre-publication research and preliminary findings. It is a place for researchers to share documents, including presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, and non-peer-reviewed manuscripts. It provides a rapid way to disseminate emerging results and new theories, solicit opinions, and record the provenance of ideas. It also makes such material easy to archive, share and cite.

Is it a new journal?

No. Nature Precedings is complementary to peer-reviewed journals. Nature Precedings aims to provide a way to share, archive and cite unpublished or soon-to-be published material. Documents on Nature Precedings are not peer-reviewed and, as such, should not be considered "published" works.

Is it a preprint server?

Yes, one legitimate use of Nature Precedings is as a place to post preprints (similar to arXiv.org in physics). "Preprint" here means a non-peer-reviewed document that the author intends eventually to submit to a journal, usually in a revised form. Before you submit material here that you intend to later submit to a journal, you should make sure that the editorial policies of the journal allow this. Nature journals will consider manuscripts that have already been circulated as preprints, but some other publishers will not, and many journals have policies that are vague or ambiguous on this point. If in doubt, please contact the journal directly to clarify their policy. Please also note that once a document is posted, it cannot be removed. Please see below for details.

What subject areas does Nature Precedings include?

Nature Precedings includes materials from biology, medicine (except clinical trials), chemistry and the earth sciences. A full list is available here. We do not include submissions in physics because there is already a service (arXiv.org) for the physical sciences. Please let us know if there are other subject areas you feel that we are missing.

Authors of papers involving nomenclatural acts are strongly advised against submitting papers to this service due to restrictions in the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (4th edition), which states in Article 9.8 that a work is not considered published within the meaning of the Code if it consists of 'text or illustrations distributed by means of electronic signals (e.g. by means of the World-Wide Web)' unless (Article 8.6) it contains as a mandatory requirement 'that it contains a statement that copies (in the form in which it is published) have been deposited in at least 5 major publicly accessible libraries which are identified by name in the work itself.'

Submitting documents

What types of documents can I submit?

Nature Precedings includes manuscripts, posters, and presentations, submitted in PDF, Word or PowerPoint format.

My manuscript/poster/presentation is in another format. Can I still submit it?

We suggest that you convert your document to a PDF file for submission. This can usually be done easily by using the Adobe Acrobat software or other third-party PDF conversion products.

Do you accept submissions in languages other than English?

No, sorry. We are not currently staffed to curate documents in other languages.

What happens after a document is submitted?

New submissions are reviewed by our curation team to ensure the quality and appropriateness of submitted documents. However, they are not subjected to peer review. Assuming that they satisfy our criteria (see below), submissions are posted immediately. The delay between submission and posting is usually no more than one working day, often much less.

What are the criteria for posting?

We will post submissions in all areas of chemistry, the earth sciences, and biomedicine except for clinical medicine. In particular, we cannot accept submissions describing the results of clinical trials or those making specific therapeutic claims. (More general claims, for example that a certain line of basic research may have clinical potential, are usually acceptable.) As mentioned above, we also do not accept submissions in the physical sciences, which is already well served by preprint servers such as arXiv.org.

Content that we consider to be non-scientific will also be rejected. We will only accept genuine contributions from qualified scientists. This will usually require submitters to have a recognized academic or scientific affiliation, and a peer-reviewed publication track record. In order to help us determine if you have an academic affiliation, we strongly recommend that you use your academic email address in your submission, although you may choose to use a different email to display as your contact information.

Does my manuscript need to be in a specific format or follow particular style guidelines?

We accept manuscripts in either Word (.doc) or PDF (.pdf) format. However, the manuscript does not need to follow particular formatting guidelines. For optimal readability, we recommend using a 10pt or 12pt font in one of the standard typefaces (Times New Roman, Arial, Verdana, etc.), however this is not required. Images should be included in the submitted file and not submitted separately.

Why don't you accept clinical submissions?

Nature Precedings content is not peer-reviewed and the consequences of potential misunderstandings or misinformation are obviously more serious in clinical medicine than in other fields.

Do the findings have to be unique or novel?

Not necessarily, but they do have to be of interest to other scientists. For example, a high-quality presentation summarising findings published more formally elsewhere would be acceptable.

Can I submit a manuscript/poster/presentation detailing negative or null results?

Yes. Submissions detailing negative results are welcome providing that they are likely to be of interest to other scientists.

Can I withdraw or retract my submission?

Nature Precedings is intended to be a permanent archive so we do not remove documents that have already been posted. Once posted, all documents receive a permanent identifier such as a DOI or Handle for citation purposes, which effectively guarantees that there will be a permanent link to the document. We also announce the posting of the document via various channels and the paper is cached by various third-party sites.

We will not remove documents in the case of an error by the author, so please carefully check your document prior to submission. If a document contains an error, the author can upload a new version of the document, which will supersede the previous version. In the case of serious errors, the author may wish to upload as a new version a blank document with the word “withdrawn” in the abstract field and explain the reason for the withdrawal. This will serve to warn others not to cite or reference the document. However, the previous version will continue to be available.

If you have submitted a document, but it has not yet become publicly available (you will receive a confirmation email on posting), you may be able to have it removed. Please immediately send an email to precedings-submissions [at] nature.com explaining your situation with the word "URGENT" and the title of your document in the subject line. Sending an email does not guarantee that your submission will be withdrawn if we do not receive your message in time.

Again, we strongly recommend that you review the editorial policies of any journals to which you are thinking of submitting before uploading your document on Nature Precedings. Nature journals will consider manuscripts that have already been circulated as preprints, but some other publishers will not, and many journals have policies that are vague or ambiguous on this point. If in doubt, please contact the journal directly to clarify their policy.

Comments and voting

Who is allowed to submit comments?: Any registered user may submit comments (registration is free). We reserve the right not to post comments we deem inappropriate. Those that merely express support or disagreement without providing any reasoning or insight into the original submission are unlikely to be posted. Vacuous comments from co-workers, or those that appear to have been made as part of an orchestrated campaign will not be posted.
What is voting and who can vote?: Voting is intended to be an informal way of showing support for a researcher’s work, and is somewhat analogous to applause at a conference. Any registered user can vote for a document. Voting is anonymous (although we do maintain a record of this information), however each user can only vote once for a submission. Authors are not able to vote for their own submissions.

Citing and archiving

How should I cite a document in Nature Precedings?

Quote the author name(s), document title and DOI (Digital Object Identifier), as follows:

Other, A. N. Document title. Available from Nature Precedings <http://dx.doi.org/10.5555/npre.2007.223.1> (2007).

Some items are not assigned a DOI but rather a Handle. These should be cited as follows:

Other, A. N. Document title. Available from Nature Precedings <http://hdl.handle.net/99.9999/npre12345> (2007).

The DOI (or Handle) can be found on the information page associated with each document, along with a suggested citation.

Since documents on Nature Precedings are not peer-reviewed, they should not be represented in citations or elsewhere as being peer-reviewed. It is a violation of our terms of service to represent non-peer-reviewed documents on Nature Precedings as peer-reviewed for personal gain. When a document on Precedings has later been published in a peer-reviewed journal, we recommend that you cite the authoritative journal article instead. In many cases, a link to the journal article can be found at the bottom of the document info page.

Why do some documents use a Handle instead of a DOI?

CrossRef, the publishing industry body that coordinates use of DOIs for citation purposes, does not assign DOIs to preprints. Handles are related to DOIs and work in a very similar way — technically, a DOI is a specific type of Handle.

How should I link to a document in Nature Precedings?

To create a link that won't break in future, use the DOI to create a link of the following form:

http://dx.doi.org/[DOI]

(Just swap the "[DOI]" bit with the real DOI.) If the URL of the document changes, this DOI-based link will be redirected, so you links will never break. For this reason, you should not use the precedings.nature.com URL to link to a document. If the document has a Handle instead of a DOI then use an URL of this form (swapping the "[HANDLE]" bit with the real Handle):

http://hdl.handle.net/[HANDLE]

What are document versions?

Nature Precedings allows submitting authors to indicate that the document they are uploading is a newer version of a previous submission. (Once a newer version is posted, readers accessing any older versions of the document are warned that a newer version exists.) New versions are assigned their own unique DOI (or Handle), making them separately citable. The number at the end of each DOI is the version number. A lower number always indicates an earlier submission (e.g., version 1 precedes version 2, and version 2 supercedes version 1).

How can I be sure that anything I submit here will remain available and free-of charge?

Partly because we say so. ;) But we realise that that won't be good enough for everyone, so we are in discussions with governmental, academic and not-for-profit organisations about establishing mirror sites in order to guarantee free availability of this content in the long-term. If you are interested in mirroring Nature Precedings content, please contact us.

Copyright and use of materials

Can I submit content for which I am not the copyright holder?: No. When submitting a document, you must verify that you hold the copyright for all the material in the document, including text and images.
I found an interesting document on Nature Precedings. Can I forward it to my colleagues or post it on my own website?: Copyright for all material posted here remains with the author(s), but anyone may make use of it under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 or 3.0 License. (Please check the relevant document information page for the license information.) Simply put, this means that the content may be quoted, copied and disseminated for any purpose, but only if the original source is correctly cited. (See above for how to do that.)
I posted my document on my personal website / blog. Can I also submit it to Nature Precedings?: Yes. We suggest that you use the form at the bottom of the document page on Nature Precedings to submit a link to the version on your personal website or blog so that readers can see comments or other additional information provided there.
I posted my document on Nature Precedings. Can I also post it on my personal website / blog?: Yes. When authors submit documents to Nature Precedings, they retain copyright and agree to license the document under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 or 3.0 License. Authors are free to (re-) distribute the document as they wish. If you do post your document on your personal website or blog, we suggest that you submit a link to the version on your site.