Nature Precedings forum: topic
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Powerpoint presentations appropriate for Nature Precedings?
Santosh Patnaik
Sunday, 24 June 2007 23:25 UTC
Powerpoint presentations can currently be submitted for deposition on Nature Precedings. Powerpoint seems to have become the lingua franca of scientific communication (e.g., see this BMJ article), and so this seems proper.
However, there can be numerous disadvantages to having Powerpoint presentations preprinted. They include:
Incompleteness – Most Powerpoint presentations are meant to accompany oral commentary (lectures, work-in-progress talks, conference presentations, etc.). Preprinted Powerpoint presentations may therefore have inadequate details and be difficult to comprehend.
Brevity – Information presented is thus likely to be difficult to evaluate.
Non-attribution – The sources of data, including images and background information, may not have been attributed to in the presentation (unlike in a manuscript). Even when attributed, there may be issues like copyright violation.
The appropriateness of Powerpoint presentations for preprinting on Nature Precedings will therefore vary widely from one to another.
Powerpoint presentations that were created for generating posters for presenting at conferences can be very good, approaching the quality of a good, traditional, short report.
Others might only highlight what is wrong with Powerpoint. One thus might argue that accepting Powerpoint presentations for preprinting encourages submission of material of low quality (from the end-user’s point of view).
It is good that Nature Precedings has a separate section for presentations that can be excluded when searching against information in the preprints.
Nature Precedings should have guidelines for quality Powerpoint presentations, and, hopefully, the resources to enforce them.
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Replies
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Thanks for the link to the BMJ article. I noticed that the article was published in 2002. Are there other formats that are being used today for scientific communication that it would be important for Precedings to support?
In regard to non-attribution, we require all authors to acknowledge that they hold the copyright for the document they are submitting, which includes copyright for the figures used in the document (unless they are properly cited / used with permission). Where it is possible, we endeavor to ensure that submissions do not violate copyright or licensing agreements. Any author concerned that their material is being inappropriately used in a presentation on Precedings should contact us directly.
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I think Powerpoint, Excel, Word, TeX and PDF formats are almost the only ones used by the scientific community to convey integrated information (image files like TIFF are typically used to pass atomic information).
Of these, PDF is a secondary format, created by converting other files. Compressed files in formats such as Zip and Stuffit are also secondary formats, but help reduce multiple files of various types to one for easy exchange.
I opine that submissions to Nature Precedings should be limited to certain formats only – perhaps, PDF, Word, and TeX. They are easily generted using free or widely available software, can be easily converted by Precedings to PDF for download by visitors, are more easily indexed (for full text searching), and are more future-proof (for Precedings to archive and/or convert to better formats in future).
PS: Here are some links to Ask E.T. forum threads discussing Powerpoint presentations:
1. Powerpoint
2. Plagiarism detection in Powerpoint presentations
3. Lousy techniques
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