Nature Precedings now has an OAI-PMH (v2) interface for metadata harvesting. OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) provides a way for search engines and other services to access data describing the contents of Nature Precedings. More information about OAI-PMH is available from the Open Archives Initiative

If you are interested in harvesting metadata from Nature Precedings, there are a number of freely available libraries for harvesting (e.g. Net::OAI::Harvester for Perl, pyoai for Python, UIUC’s Java project…)

Anyone may access the metadata free of charge and the metadata may be re-used without prior permission provided the OAI Identifier or a link to the original metadata record are given. Text within the abstracts (e.g. included in the dc:description element) is copyrighted by the author/s of the article and covered by the Creative Commons license specified (usually CC-BY 2.5 or CC-BY 3.0).

The base URL for issuing requests for Nature Precedings is http://precedings.nature.com/oai2

Some sample queries:

List subject groups (e.g. sets) http://precedings.nature.com/oai2?verb=ListSets

List all article identifiers:
http://precedings.nature.com/oai2?verb=ListIdentifiers&metadataPrefix=oai_dc

List records posted between two dates (e.g. November 2007):
http://precedings.nature.com/oai2?verb=ListRecords&from=2007-11-01T09:47:49Z&until=2007-11-30T09:47:49Z&metadataPrefix=oai_dc

Fetch metadata for a particular record using the Dublin Core metadata format:
http://precedings.nature.com/oai2?verb=GetRecord&identifier=oai%3Anature%2Ecom%3A10%2E1038/npre%2E2006%2E7%2E1&metadataPrefix=oai_dc