socialscience@web2.0

It has been a long time since I’ve added anything here, caused by moving house and the usual panic about not having written enough thesis. The thesis is still underwritten (although not in an insurable sense), however I came across this website, which I couldn’t resist posting about.

Home : Nature Precedings

The brilliantly named Nature ‘Precedings’ provides pre-publication access to studies submitted to the journal or, as described in last June’s press release is “a new free online service, which will enable researchers to share, discuss, and cite their early findings prior to publication. What is interesting is that it comes with a disclaimer - these studies are not peer-reviewed. This has prompted me to a few, as yet unclear quesions. What is the place of this website in the academic publishing world? Nature papers are among the most prestigious, yet these papers have not yet gone through the review process, and presumably are still in need of some tweaking. My first thoughts are that this represents an interesting academic response to the pressures of press conferences and the ‘non-academic’ publication path. In addition, by opening up ‘preceedings’ to public view, the peer review process itself is opened to more scrutiny, although the relationship between review and the ‘votes’ that Nature encourages onn papers is left unclear. Voting is described as “an informal way of showing support for a researcher’s work”. What happens if a paper accumulates a huge number of positive votes, yet fails peer review? Is this extended peer review or an appeal to popularism? Perhaps more cynically, who will vote if the votes don’t count for anything - are scientists as prone to wanton voting as BBC website users, or, as the website seems to be copying, Digg users? Time will tell.