What’s up with preprints? And why I’m bothering with them.
A few answers to @hormiga post about why he’s not bothering with preprints.
1. I don’t mind waiting a few months or a couple years for people to see my paper. If there’s anybody who I want to find out about my stuff right away, then I’ll send it to them. I don’t think I’m making the world suffer by waiting a little longer than they’re already waiting.
Answer: You publish to communicate your science so, hopefully, others will be influenced and can build on it to do more great stuff. You may not mind making the world wait longer but that only means you’ll unnecessarily delay influencing and impacting others.
2. I don’t expect that I’ll get more or better peer review by using preprints than using other approaches.
A: You’ll never find out I guess. That’s like saying there is no point in presenting a poster or giving a talk at a conference because you’re not going to get better feedback than through formal pre-publication peer-review. In reality, you never know where the good suggestions will come from, so the wider you disseminate your work, the more chance that you’ll get useful feedback.
3. I want my papers to have a single (and better) version available to the public. Let’s say I have manuscript that I’m ready to submit to a journal. And so I upload the preprint and submit it at the same time. Then, the peer reviews from the journal come back with editorial remarks. And I then make some changes that improve the paper. Then that one will get published. So now, the world has access to this paper that’s not as good? Why would I want this? Can I avoid this by not posting a preprint? Yay!
A: Indeed, it takes guts to post a preprint. We want to see your own version, not the editor or reviewer-modified one. That first unaltered submission is a true reflection of your quality as a scientist. If you call yourself an expert on something then you better get the preprint right. Am I going to hire a biochemist whose preprint experiment lacks obvious controls? Nope.
4. I’d prefer a paper to splash than trickle out. If I have a paper that’s interesting and exciting, and then I want to be able to share this once the legit peer-reviewed version comes out.
A: Why not have the splash earlier? And what kind of a splash will you have once you get scooped?
5. I might have fucked up in a paper, and maybe I don’t want to outsource the detection of this fuckup to the entire world? And I might not want to expose my student coauthors to this possibility?
A: Again, it takes guts to post a preprint. And we want to know when you fuck up. Better, we want to know how you react when you find out that you fucked up. Currently, we lack incentives for self-correction. Your students would only become better scientists if they learn to admit that they were wrong and proceed to fix the record.
6. I think preprints exacerbate the malady of careerism that makes it difficult for junior scientists to treat science like a normal job. To get ahead in academia, you gotta do MORE! FASTER! BIGGER! and it feels like the epitome of this is the need to magically publish your papers before they get published. I think preprint advocates might think that they are a prescription to fix the rat race, but I think it just puts the rats in a more convoluted maze. Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.
A: Srsly? One of the most frustrating aspects of academia is publishing. It’s stressful, takes ages, and there is a lingering feeling that it’s unfair and gamed. You write up your work and proudly submit it to some journal only to have an editor or reviewer tell you that it’s not broad impact, not appropriate for this journal, you need to do more work etc. In my experience, this is turning off many youngsters from science. Colleagues tell me that posting preprints relieves a lot of that pressure. It’s a liberating feeling to finish writing up a paper and immediately share it with everyone. You should try it.
7. If preprints do become the norm, then there’ll be a ton of crappy preprints with unsubstantiated results and highly flawed experimental designs that wouldn’t get past the editorial process of a legit journal. But I’m sure every single one of you reads every scientific paper from start to finish and comprehensively decides whether the methods were sound and the analyses were robust before citing it.
A: There is already tons of crappy peer-reviewed papers. Deeply flawed papers get published in all sorts of journals (#arseniclife anyone?), and continue to get cited even after they’re debunked or retracted.
8. If I were to create a list of 100 things that we should be changing about how we do and publish science, preprints wouldn’t be on my list. So until it becomes the norm, I’ll fuss over things that matter more to me.
A: The way we publish science is costly both in terms of the scientists time commitment to editing and reviewing, and the outrageous page charges that end up fattening the profit margins of scientific publishers. Preprints are free.
Find out more about preprints at #ASAPbio.
Image from PrePubmed (June 2017 stats).
