Nature Precedings – pre-publication research and preliminary findings

You may have heard about Nature Precedings. It’s relevant to us in many ways - from copyright implications, to sharing of findings and ease of access to archiving and preservation.

Nature Precedings is a place for researchers to share documents, including presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, and manuscripts. It is a free service which describes itself as providing a rapid way to disseminate emerging results and new theories, solicit opinions, and record the provenance of ideas. It makes such material easy to archive, share and cite.

The site states that you should only submit material to Nature Precedings if you own the copyright (which will usually mean that you wrote it) and have the permission of any other copyright holders (e.g., in the case of a co-authored piece of work, the other authors). They specifically ask that if you are uploading a presentation you take particular care that none of your slides contain material for which you do not own the copyright.

Copyright for all documents remains with the author(s). Others may make use of the material under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Licence. 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.

As well as making scientific documents citable, Nature Precedings also aims to make them globally available and stably archived. To this end, they are in discussions with governmental, academic and not-for-profit organisations about providing mirror sites of Nature Precedings content. The plan is that if, for any reason, this content becomes unavailable from Nature Publishing Group, it will continue to be available through those sites.