Four different reasons to post preprints
Preprints are in the air! A few weeks ago, Stephen Curry had a piece about them?in the Guardian (Peer review, preprints and the speed of science) and pterosaur palaeontologist Liz Martin published?Preprints in science on her blog Musings of Clumsy Palaeontologist. The latter in particular has spawned a prolific and fascinating comment stream. Then SV-POW!’s?favourite journal, PeerJ, weighed in on its own blog with?A PeerJ PrePrint ? so just what is that exactly?.
Following on from that, I was invited to contribute?a guest-post to?the PeerJ blog: they’re asking several people about their experiences with PeerJ Preprints, and publishing?the results in a series. I started to write my answers in an email,?but they soon got long enough that I concluded it made more sense to write my own post instead.?This is that post.
As a matter of fact, I’ve submitted four PeerJ preprints, and all of them for quite different reasons.
1. Barosaurus neck. I and Matt submitted the Barosaurus manuscript as a preprint because we wanted to get feedback as quickly as possible. We certainly got it: four very long detailed comments that were more helpful than most formally solicited peer-reviews that I’ve had. (It’s to our discredit that we didn’t then turn the manuscript around immediately, taking those reviews into a account. We do still plan to do this, but other things happened.)
2. Dinosaur diversity. Back in 2004 I submitted my first ever scientific paper, a survey of dinosaur diversity broken down in various ways. It was rejected (for what I thought were spurious reasons, but let it pass). The more time that passed, the more out of date the statistics became. As my interests progressed in other directions, I reached the point of realising that I was never going to get around to bringing that paper up to date and resubmitting it to a journal. Rather than let it be lost to the world, when I think it still contains much that is of interest, I published it as a pre-print (although it’s not pre- anything: what’s posted is the final version).
3. Cartilage angles. Matt and I had a paper published on PLOS ONE in 2013, on the effect that intervertebral cartilage had on sauropod neck posture. Only after it was published did I realise that there was a very simple way to quantify the geometric effect. I wrote what was intended to be a one-pager on that, planning to issue it as a sort of erratum. It ended up much longer than expected, but because I considered it to be material that should really have been in the original PLOS ONE paper, I wanted to get it out as soon as possible. So as soon as the manuscript was ready, I submitted it simultaneously as a preprint and onto the peer-review track at PeerJ. (It was published seven weeks later.)
4. Apatosaurine necks. Finally, I gave a talk at this year’s SVPCA (Symposium on Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy), based on an in-progress manuscript in which I am second author to Matt. The proceedings of the symposium are emerging as a PeerJ Collection, and I and the other authors wanted our paper to be a part of that collection. So I submitted the abstract of the talk I gave, with the slide-deck as supplementary information. In time, this version of the preprint will be superseded by the completed manuscript, and eventually (we hope) by the peer-reviewed paper.
So the thing to take away from this is that there are lots?of reasons to publish preprints. They open up different ways of thinking about the publication process.
