22 November 2024

Clearing out the vault by posting preprints

Old books on a shelf
My last jobs didn’t have any expectations for research, so my publication rate slowed significantly. I wanted to do something about that.

A few months ago, I published a submitted but not completed article on paying peer reviewers here on the blog and on Figshare. This got me digging around in folders on my hard drive and I got thinking about other articles that I had written, submitted, but weren’t accepted. And at the time, I just ran out of steam to revise and resubmit them in ways that would satisfy an editor and a couple of reviewers. 

So in recent weeks, I have taken to submitting some of those manuscripts to a preprint server.

In the past, I was a little cool to the value of preprints. I always thought they had some uses, but I was skeptical that they would replace journals, which was the stated wish for some of the strongest preprint advocates. 

But since I last wrote about preprints, the attention landscape has changed. More people in biology have started scanning through preprint servers part of their routine. I was surprised when a reporter emailed me about one of these preprints and wanted to chat for an interview. I don’t think that would have happened a few years ago.

Whether these will be “final” public version of these little projects, I can’t say. I have other projects that I want to get out that have not been written up at all yet that I want to try to get into a journal. But I am glad that every one of these received at least a little attention on Bluesky.

Here’s the list of my recent preprints, all on bioRxiv.

Related posts

A pre-print experiment: will anyone notice?

A pre-print experiment, continued  

A pre-print experiment, part 3: Someone did notice  

Photo by umjadedoan on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.

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