Nature Precedings

» see precedings.nature.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

I read preprints for a living. Computer vision moves fast enough that the published version of a paper is usually the one you already read eight months earlier, so arXiv is part of the working week rather than a curiosity. That habit is the reason Nature Precedings is an odd thing to write up. Nature built it for exactly that reflex in 2007, and aimed it at biologists, who had not yet picked the reflex up.

Nature Publishing Group opened it in June 2007 under Timo Hannay, its director for web publishing, with the British Library and the Wellcome Trust among the named partners. The scope was biology and chemistry. Physics and mathematics were deliberately excluded, because arXiv had been doing that job since 1991 and nobody needed a second one.

Nothing on it was peer reviewed. A curator checked that a submission was genuine scientific work, and then it went up with a permanent identifier and a comment thread under it. Uptake was polite rather than large: 55 documents in the first fifteen days, 303 by the end of the first six months. Retraction Watch put the eventual total in the thousands.

On 30 March 2012 everyone registered on the site got an email. "As of April 3rd 2012, we will cease to accept submissions to Nature Precedings." The reason given was that technological advances and the needs of the research community had evolved to the point where the site was "unsustainable as it was originally conceived." Grace Baynes at NPG confirmed the email was genuine when researchers started asking whether it was a hoax.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the promise ~

That same email carried a sentence most shutdowns never bother with. "Nature Precedings will then be archived, and the archive will be maintained by NPG, while all hosted content will remain freely accessible to all." Promises of that shape are cheap to make on the way out, and this collection is largely made of the ones that were broken within a few years.

This one survived. The original hostname did not: precedings.nature.com was still serving the archive on 20 April 2020, had turned into a redirect by 27 April, and today does not resolve at all. The content itself moved to nature.com/npre, which answers right now with the full document archive behind it and a journal-information page still carrying the original wording. "Nature Precedings ceased accepting new submissions as of April 3rd, 2012. The full archive of existing content remains freely accessible at this site."

~ the next chapter ~

Biology did get its preprint server, just not from a publisher. bioRxiv opened in November 2013, nineteen months after Precedings stopped taking work, run by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory rather than by anybody in the journal business.

What Precedings got wrong was not the idea. It was early for a research culture that had not yet agreed to be seen working in public, and it was owned by a publisher whose core business was the step that preprints route around. Five years later the same proposal from a laboratory instead of a journal found a field ready to say yes.

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