Monday, June 18, 2007

Nature Precedings - Digital assets for free

The speed of change in scientific and biomedical publishing is surprising sometimes (and the uptake of the use of Web 2.0 tools by the journal community).

Perhaps you know about PLoS One? Now, here's Nature Precedings:

"Nature Precedings is a place for researchers to share documents, including presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, and 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 toarchive, share and cite. The whole service is free of charge."

And, even an editorial on this new project, intended to cover biomedicine, chemistry and the Earth sciences.

Will Google scholar crawl all of these knowledge objects? Where will all this fragmentation leave our searching? Boggles the mind. - Dean

3 comments:

Dr. Rupak Chakravarty said...

Its good news and a good move also. We all gain when digital scholarship is put in the public domain. Knowledge can't grow in isolation. Knowledge grow when shared and this knowledge sharing leads to knowledge society. I wonder some day when we meet aliens or ETs, they must be living in a knowledge society. But a single search engine for searching all the IRs of the world or for that matter complete digital scholarship must be there.

Dr. Rupak Chakravarty said...

Its good news and a good move also. We all gain when digital scholarship is put in the public domain. Knowledge can't grow in isolation. Knowledge grow when shared and this knowledge sharing leads to knowledge society. I wonder some day when we meet aliens or ETs, they must be living in a knowledge society. But a single search engine for searching all the IRs of the world or for that matter complete digital scholarship must be there.

Marcus said...

Thanks Dean--I am grateful to learn about Nature Precedings. Basically, it's making grey literature less grey, more "white" (to use the European term for post peer-reviewed lit.) This is more proof that grey/non-grey categories are blurring.