Nature Precedings

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Nature Precedings was an open-access online repository run by Nature Publishing Group for early, pre-publication research in biology, chemistry, earth sciences, and medicine (excluding clinical trial results). It began in June 2007 and stopped accepting new submissions on April 3, 2012. It served as a permanent, citable archive for preprints, posters, presentations, white papers, and other non-peer‑reviewed work, letting researchers share results quickly, get feedback, and claim priority over discoveries.

Key features
- Content included manuscripts, preliminary reports, white papers, and presentations; physics and mathematics were not included (arXiv covers those).
- Submissions could be revised after posting, with the original version remaining accessible and newer versions added.
- Submissions were not peer‑reviewed, but there was an informal commenting system for feedback.
- Authors retained copyright and could publish under Creative Commons licenses (CC BY 2.5 or 3.0).
- Each preprint was identified by a DOI and could be cited like a traditional article.
- The site supported metadata sharing (OAI-PMH v2) and was indexed in Scopus.
- It was created to help scientists share work rapidly and to help establish priority, while journals sometimes debated potential conflicts with the Ingelfinger rule (that journals may reject work already published or publicly shared).

Background
Nature Precedings was started in 2007 under Timo Hannay, with partnerships from the British Library, the European Bioinformatics Institute, Science Commons, and the Wellcome Trust. It provided a platform for quick dissemination of results across biology, chemistry, earth sciences, and medicine, under author-controlled licenses.