Precedings and Blogs
Hilary Spencer
Monday, 18 June 2007 22:56 UTC
Most of the feedback on Precedings has been positive, however one blogger asks ‘why post on Precedings when one can just post on one’s blog?’
To me, there seem to be very good reasons to post on Precedings, the first of which involves stability. Blogs, and personal webpages, can be ephemeral. If the author changes affiliations, domain names, or even blog publishing software, blog postings may disappear. One of the goals of Precedings is to create a stable permanent archive for researchers. We anticipate that the content will be mirrored by one or more of our partner organizations, thus ensuring that the researcher’s work will always be available.
The second related reason involves ”citability”. Blogs citations currently fall in a gray area—there is no definitive way to cite a blog posting, although this is changing. One of the benefits of Precedings is that every document posted is citable, thus ensuring that the author can be properly credited with the idea. We assign a DOI or a handle to every submission, which provides a permanent identifier for the document and can be used in citations.
A final reason is exposure. For many researchers, posting to a central archive provides more exposure for their ideas than they would receive by posting it on their website. For example, I think authors tend to get more exposure when their documents are also listed in PubMed rather than only on their personal website. (Precedings allows researchers to link submissions to postings on their blogs for redundancy.) To that end, we hope Precedings will help researchers reach a wider audience for their ideas.
Nature has always been very supportive of the blogging community, but we feel that Precedings fills a gap between (informal) blogs and (formal) peer-reviewed publications. What are your thoughts?
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Replies
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Partly agreed. I see it like this: Preceedings to a blog is like what is a conference proceedings to a work meeting.
To me, my blogs is the most efficient way to communicate and discuss things with fellow scientists. Where I used to email things I found interested or discovered via mailing lists (often more than one), I now put them in my blog.
BTW, I do not plan to not post my conference slides to NP, and am not really interested in seeing them show up on NP. Powerpoint like presentations are too informal, require to much context: they lack the detail as good slides are really the extras during a presentation, not the exact content. This means that the life span of such NP contributions is much smaller, and that stability is actually a non-issue: it simply does not contain enough details to be useful in a couple of years. (They might of course… but then they would be bad presentation slides).
For me it is, therefore, very important to be able to browse NP and get notified about new submissions in NP where I can filter out slide like documents. Blogs are actually more suitable for distributing slides. Or do it in the following way: make every slide an item in your blog. That seems to work for some successful bloggers.
BTW, the first paper I contributed is actually a conference contribution. A virtual conference, and the contribution has the form of a paper instead of slides.
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While the charge of instability could be leveled at self-hosted blogs, it does not apply to sites such as wordpress.com, or blogger.
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Scientific information is always discovered and utilized better if it co-exists with other information. And so there is PubMed and not a Yahoo index, society journals and not private pamphlets.
Preprints that are in a repository of preprints can be discovered better (e.g., one would turn to search Nature Precedings and not Google blog posts), and can be utilized better (e.g., by identifying other preprints on the same topic). And, as Hilary enumerates, there are other reasons for posting to a preprint system and not a blog.
Still, Nature Precedings should be used to post only ‘publishable’ material: original, detailed, formally composed, and hopefully new.
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You should feel free to do both – post on your blog and Precedings, IMHO. The downside to this is that ideally you want commentary in one place – Precedings is the most visible, stable location but your blog is where the people most likely to comment on your work are.
(AJ: actually I think the stability of blogs is more of an issue for blogs hosted on Wordpress and Blogger… it’s not so bad now but a while back you couldn’t move for bloggers complaining about how Blogger had removed their blogs as spam, in error, without making a backup first).
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Posting on both your blog and Precedings is probably how you would get the most visibility for your research. Precedings allows one one to link the Precedings version to other versions on the Internet, such as one on your blog (see the bottom of the document information page for a particular submission). We hope that this feature makes it possible for authors to get the benefits of both options.
Euan’s point about commenting in multiple locations is a great point. There are many reasons why people might prefer to comment in one location over another. Blogs can seem more informal and more intimate than Precedings. However, having a single login for Precedings makes it easy for one to comment on multiple submissions. I think that ultimately the user will probably comment in the place where they feel most comfortable.
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My twopennorth: Cross-posting between blogs is accepted practice, with appropriate cross-referencing. Attila Csordas, for example, blogs the same posts on The Niche and his personal blog Pimm (by agreement—I think the Niche gets the post first by a day or something like that), and similarly he has a blog on N Network (Science Hacks) that overlaps with Pimm posts (the science publishing-related ones that aren’t about stem cells).
So cross-posting in this way is useful to an individual for specialising-archiving—another example is that I have a general personal blog on which I sometimes review books. I hive off those reviews into another blog solely for that purpose, so that I have a dedicated archive just of that one category. For the book review blog, I chose a different provider, one that links direct into Amazon (etc) so that I can instantly add pictures of the book being reviewed into posts, which I can’t do on my regular blog without up and downloading to/from my hard drive. (The book review blog has other provider limitations though, serious ones (it is Vox), but good for this particular purpose.)
Seems to me that if Precedings is a “posting” site not a formal “publishing” site (which is a grey area given that Precedings provides dois but blogs don’t), there is no reason not to cross-post so long as the posts are also crossreferenced—as it provides useful options for user specialisation as in the examples I’ve provided. -
I am not sure why I have come out as Anonymous in the post immediately above as I am logged in, but I am Maxine (Clarke).
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OK, let’s get to the 500 pound gorilla in the room.
Nothing being discussed here (blogs, Preceedings) has an impact score, so it doesn’t get academic authors any credit from their institutions. In fact, in the run-up to the UK RAE, it may even attract some heat. -
For clarification, AJ was the source of the original post I was responding to—sorry I didn’t note this earlier.
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I am with Egon. One possibility is to put material on Precedings, material that stands on its own and can be discussed. Additional thoughts related to that material and more informal discussions related to that article belong on the authors blog and I wish more scientists do that. Also, discussion can happen anywhere, but can/should be tracked to the material uploaded to Precedings. Unfortunately trackbacks are severely broken in most systems, but to me that is the best way to carry out a conversation. They way, someone visiting Precedings can identify other discussions related to the paper/material they are viewing.
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