Comment notifications
Authors can now opt to receive notification when new comments are added to their document by checking a box during the submission process. Commenters can also opt to receive notification of when someone responds to their comment.

Watermarks on PDFs
The DOI (or Handle) and date of posting are now embedded in all PDFs on Nature Precedings. By embedding the identifier in the document, readers of the PDF will be able to correctly reference or cite the document, even when they have received the document via email or accessed the document via a “deep-link”.

Document thumbnails
Document thumbnails are cute, but also serve as a memory aid and preview. Plus, they can be embedded in blogs and webpages.

Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Geological Storage of CO2 Tara LaForce1 1. Imperial College London

We’ve also made a number of under-the-hood improvements which will help with performance and usability. Please let us know what you think.

A guide to using Textile can be found on Nature Network, here, and a more comprehensive reference can be found here. The preview function for comments on Precedings will let you make sure your comment will look as you intended.

For an example of this formatting in use on Precedings, check out Cesar Sanchez’s comment on Streptomyces sp. as predators of bacteria on Nature Precedings.

Last week, Nature Precedings switched to using the 3.0 version of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The human readable version and the legal version are both available from the Creative Commons website. Details about changes in the 3.0 licenses are here.

New submissions will be licensed under the CC-by 3.0 license. Documents posted under the CC-by 2.5 license will continue to be licensed under the 2.5 version. Please contact us if you are a Precedings author and wish to upgrade a previous submission to use the 3.0 version.

The Creative Commons FAQ is also a great resource for anyone who has questions about CC-licensing.

It’s Time to Free the Dark Data of Failed Scientific Experiments

Goetz argues that the “vast body of squandered knowledge” produced by experiments that failed to produce the hoped for results needs to be shared. Nature Precedings is described as an “island of innovation”, along with the Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine and JC Bradley’s open notebook science project (which he describes in a Precedings post)

Goetz’s article follows a blog post by his Wired colleague Brandon Keim:

Nature’s Controversial New Non-Journal: Bazaar, not Cathedral

Keim describes Precedings as a space for “not only unpublished manuscripts, but the assorted notes, presentations, white papers and other effluvia that would never appear in a journal, but could be useful for researchers” and “the wealth of scientific materials generated during research, of which peer-reviewed journal articles are only the iceberg’s tip”.

Since the launch of Nature Precedings, we’ve been encouraging researchers to submit manuscripts or posters describing negative or null results in addition to documents describing preliminary positive findings. Precedings is designed as a space for “pre-publication research”, which includes all pieces of research generated during the scientific process. Experiments that generated negative or null results are definitely part of this process.

Try it out

To limit your search to Nature Precedings documents only, enter the parameter dccoll:webnaturepreced. Or you can use the advanced search to search by author or title.