It would be good to have an article’s bibliography/reference-list displayed, with appropriate links to seek each reference, on the summary (‘document information’) page for the article on the Nature Precedings site. See this page on the U. Southampton/ECS eprint system for an example.

Most article authors do not provide links for references in their manuscripts. Having links this way therefore helps viewers. Also, it will aid in estimating the quality and content of articles before downloading them, and will facilitate software-based citation evaluations.

Nature Precedings can provide an extra form field for bibliography that authors can use to copy-paste their reference list in when submitting manuscripts. Alternately, it should not be difficult to have some software extract the bibliography from the article.

Because providing direct links (to abstracts or full-text content) for each reference may be too resource-intensive for the Nature Precedings team, indirect links that direct one to results from specialized search engines will suffice. The example page mentioned earlier has such indirect links (using ParaCite).