Would you report on Nature Precedings?

The recent discussion about journals and their love of embargoes looks slightly strange in the light of the development of services such as Nature Precedings. This new web site describes itself as "a place for researchers to share pre-publication research, unpublished manuscripts, presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, and other scientific documents".

The description goes on to say that something called their "professional curation team" will screen submissions "for relevance and quality". But there will be no peer review.

The site seems to be a scientific version of "Digg" and the many other social networks that encourage members to vote on submissions. Nature Precedings has a place for "Most popular submissions". When we looked the hot paper, with 32 votes, was Henry Niman's "Swine Influenza A Evolution via Recombination – Genetic Drift Reservoir".

They offer RSS feeds so that you don't have to go and visit the web site to see what is happening. But how should science writers respond to this sort of thing? Are the papers "legit" enough to warrant coverage.

Friends over at AlphaGalileo used to tell me that in most of Europe science writers will not cover anything that has not been peer reviewed. How will they take to such a development when it emanates from a publishing outfit as prestigious as Nature?

The FAQ for the service says that the aim is "to share, archive and cite material that is preliminary or supplementary". You could, they say, use it as a "preprint server". Here they are following the lead of arXiv.org, which has done this sort of thing for years. This is also why Nature does not accept stuff on physics, perhaps fearful that people would see this as the heavy hand of a commercial outfit trying to respond to the open access movement.

The FAQ does not explicitly deal with media coverage, but it does say that "the content may be quoted, copied and disseminated for any purpose, but only if the original source is correctly cited". Maybe this would be an insurmountable barrier for the many newspapers that refuse to provide full details of authorship and publication when they write about papers.

Dirty tricks close in on open access

There's an interesting taster over on IWR Blog about a nice scandal uncovered by Nature. It seems that the heavyweight publishers of expensive journals have been, horror of horrors, using PR people to advise on their campaigns to fend off the rush to open access.

There probably wouldn't be much surprise at this revelation were it not for the fact that "Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, American Chemical Society as well as the Association of American Publishers (AAP)" had signed up "a PR man whose career has been spent putting a positive spin on fraudsters like Jeffrey Skilling of Enron and denying scientific evidence of climate change".

The puzzling things is that the advice they got is so lame. As Jim Giles on Nature puts it:

The consultant advised them to focus on simple messages, such as "Public access equals government censorship". He hinted that the publishers should attempt to equate traditional publishing models with peer review, and "paint a picture of what the world would look like without peer-reviewed articles".

Other advice, that the opponents of open access should paint the move as some sort of communist plot, seems to come from someone completely out of touch with the scientific world. Scientists are notoriously non-conformist.

It would be amazing if commercial publishers, including Nature, which has done its bit to question the open access movement and is flooding the market with new paying only journals, did not indulge in some lobbying, subtle and not so subtle. But it seems counterproductive to have to sign up someone who, from these reports, makes Tony Blair's spin doctors sound like models of correctness.

There's a nice "Editor's note" at the end of Jim's story:

In the original version of this story, Susan Spilka was reported as emailing a note that said "Media massaging is not the same as intellectual debate." It should have read "Media messaging", and has been changed accordingly.

Both versions seem perfectly reasonable to me. And since when did people check their emails that carefully?

tag: open access, PR, journals, Nature