In my view, producing knowledge in a Science 2.0 world is about communicating through redundancy, making it easy to prove who-knew-what-when. That is difficult to do with the traditional scientific publication system of giving away copyright. (Not impossible, because concepts and results can be rewritten using different words, but still difficult).
This should be interesting. Here is a description of Nature Precedings:
will enable researchers to share, discuss and cite their early findings. It provides a lightly moderated and relatively informal channel for scientists to disseminate information, especially recent experimental results and emerging conclusions. In this sense, it is designed to complement traditional peer-reviewed journals, allowing researchers to make informal communications such as conference papers or presentations more widely available and enabling them to be formally cited. This, in turn, allows them to solicit community feedback and establish priority over their results or ideas.
With open preprint systems, being able to find useful and reliable ideas and data in articles is perhaps more important than being able to submit one. This becomes apparent as the number of articles increase, when searching can return hundreds and thousands of articles. One can’t go through all of them, and a few ‘bad’ articles can easily cause frustration and distrust in the quality of the submissions.
But if search criteria can include objective measures of article quality, then one can indeed easily find valuable material. Nature Precedings should therefore opt for a point-based rating system where different aspects of articles can be appraised.
Thus, instead of just letting one vote for an article, one should be allowed to rate its different aspects on, say, a 1-5 scale. Such aspects can include:
1. clarity
2. originality
3. novelty
4. presence and quality of experimental data
5. logical procession
6. depth
7. proper referencing
In effect, this would be a proper peer-review system.
The ratings, both their average and their spread, should be displayed alongside articles.
A good review/rating system will discourage submission of bad articles, build trust in the usability and reliability of content in Nature Precedings, and encourage quality submissions.
(similar comments posted elsewhere on the web by me)