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. I was always worried about the Matthew effect: that famous labs would benefit from preprints and everyone else would just have more work to do.
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.
- Trends in hoaxes of academic communication. 🔊 Audio summary
- Uninterpretable graphs at a scientific conference. 🔊 Audio summary
- When crayfish make news, headlines are correct but still misleading. 🔊 Audio summary:
Update, 26 November 2024: I’ve now had two journalists reach out to me because of these preprints. I’ve never had that high a level of interest from the dozens of peer-reviewed journal articles I published.
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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