Nature Precedings

For anyone who has not already noticed, Nature just launched a preprint server at Nature Precedings.

Nature Precedings is a place for researchers to share pre-publication research, unpublished manuscripts, presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, and other scientific documents.

This site is similar in concept to the very successful physics and mathematics preprint server ArXiv. This is a great development for the biological sciences. Researchers can post pre-publication data/manuscripts and get peer-review from the community. However, one question immediately comes up. If you post a manuscript on Nature Precedings can you later submit it to Nature?

Because I couldn't find an answer to this question, I did a bit of my own research on the topic. I first contacted Nature Precedings and received a rapid reply from Hilary Spencer. She said:

...In general, while Nature journals will consider material that has been
posted to a preprint server, some other publishers will not. We recommend
verifying the editorial policies of the journal prior to submission to
Precedings...

She also directed me to Nature's publishing guidelines, which are actually quite clear on the issue. I've put a few excerpts below.

Material submitted to Nature journals must not be discussed with the media, except in the case of accepted contributions, which can be discussed with the media no more than a week before the publication date under our embargo conditions. We reserve the right to halt the consideration or publication of a paper if this condition is broken.

Nature journals do not wish to hinder communication between scientists. For that reason, different embargo guidelines apply to work that has been discussed at a conference or displayed on a preprint server and picked up by the media as a result. (Neither conference presentations nor posting on recognized preprint servers constitute prior publication.)

Contributions submitted to or in press with a Nature journal must not be posted on any web site, except for preprints posted on recognized preprint servers (such as ArXiv) where this is community practice. The server concerned must be identified to the editor in the cover letter accompanying submission of the paper, and the content of the paper must not be advertised to the media by virtue of being on the preprint server.

So it looks like preprint servers get an OK from Nature, as long as you don't talk to the press. This is great news.

Preprint servers have the potential to revolutionize the publication process. I believe the purpose of peer-review is to get feedback from the community to help a researcher improve their work. Preprint servers allow this to happen in real time. Currently a researcher completes a project, writes up the paper, and then gets peer-review of the work. In a perfect world, or the world with preprint servers, a researcher can post preliminary results, immediately get peer-review, and use the peer-review to improve the work. When the project is truly at an endpoint the work can be written up for publication. Publication of a project that has already been peer-reviewed on a preprint server should be simple.

However, I expect that there will be one major problem to the adoption of Nature Precedings by the biological sciences community, FEAR. Sharing preliminary data with the scientific community is quite terrifying to many researchers. There is a great fear of being scooped. This fear does not have to be a problem. Posting to the preprint server can serve as “publication” for the purposes of credit. The first to post on the server can be recognized as the first to have done the work. Articles posted to the preprint server are given a unique DOI that can be referenced in other publications. If the community decides to accept the preprint server as a reference than all proper credit can be given. I believe this is how the physics community treats data posted on their preprint server.

The launching of Nature Precedings may be a turning point in the publication process and improve peer-review.