Nature Precedings as an Archiving Tool for ONS Solubility Book

The issue of archiving and citation is a topic that is usually raised whenever I give a talk about Open Notebook Science. We have recently tried to address this using several complementary strategies.

The publication of a book containing a snapshot of all the values obtained from the Open Notebook Science Solubility Challenge has turned out to be a convenient mechanism. By using LuLu, the book can be either downloaded for free as a PDF or ordered as a physical copy for just the printing and shipping charges.

However, Lulu does not have a convenient method of keeping track of different editions of the book and it is unclear how to best cite them.

Nature Precedings solves both of these problems quite nicely. I have uploaded the PDF of each book edition to NP and the versions are automatically linked to each other. In fact if you try to access an older edition, NP pops up a warning that a more recent version is available with the corresponding link (see image below).

Precedings also provides information about how to cite the document, including a DOI for each version. Unfortunately it appears that it can take some time for the DOIs to resolve. Links to different versions can also be formatted like this:

http://precedings.nature.com/documents/4243/version/1
http://precedings.nature.com/documents/4243/version/2
http://precedings.nature.com/documents/4243/version/3

Links to the Lulu version of each book are also provided, which is convenient for anyone who might want to order a physical copy.

At this time Precedings does not accept zip files containing the full archive of the source files for each book version - although a link to the archive is provided in the preface of the book. We have found that our library's DSpace repository is a convenient location for these.