An increasing number of servers are
becoming available for posting preprints. This allows authors to post versions
of their papers before publication in a peer-reviewed journal. I think this is
great. In fact, based on my experiences with preprints so far, if I didn’t need
journal publications to get a job, I don’t think I would ever submit another
paper to a journal again. Here, I describe the advantages of preprints, and
address some concerns that I’ve heard from colleagues who are less enthusiastic
about preprints.
The “How” of preprints
Preprints can be simply uploaded to
a preprint server: for example, on psyarxiv.com, via osf.io, or even on
researchgate. It’s easy. This covers the “how” part.
The “Why” of preprints
In an ideal world, a publication
serves as a starting point for a conversation, or as a contribution to an
already ongoing discussion. Preprints fulfil this purpose more effectively than
journal publications. Their publication takes only a couple of minutes, while
publication in a journal can take anywhere between a couple of months to a
couple of years. With modern technology, preprints are findable for
researchers. Preprints are often posted on social media websites, such as
twitter, and are then circulated by others who are interested in the same topic,
and critically discussed. With many preprint servers, preprints become listed
on google scholar, which sends alerts to researchers who are following the
authors. The preprint can also be linked to supplementary material, such as the
data and analysis codes, thus facilitating open and reproducible science.
Preprints are advantageous to show an
author’s productivity: If someone (especially an early career researcher) is
unlucky in obtaining journal publications, they can demonstrate, on their CV,
that they are productive, and potential employers can check the preprint to
verify its quality and the match of research interests.
The author has a lot of flexibility
in the decision of when to upload a preprint. The earlier a preprint is
uploaded, the more possibilities the author has to receive feedback from
colleagues and incorporate them in the text. The OSF website, which allows
users to upload preprints, has a version control function. This means that an
updated version of the file can be uploaded, while the older version is
archived. Searches will lead to the most recent version, thus avoiding version
confusion. At the same time, it is possible to track the development of the
paper.
The “When” of preprints
In terms of timing, one option is
to upload a preprint shortly after it has been accepted for publication at a
journal. In line with many journals’ policies, this is a way to make your
article openly accessible to everyone: while uploading the final,
journal-formatted version is a violation of copyright, uploading the author’s
version is generally allowed1.
Another option is to post a
preprint at the same time as submitting the paper to a journal. This has an
additional advantage: It allows the authors to receive more feedback. Readers
who are interested in the topic may contact the author with corrections or
suggestions. If this happens, the author can still make changes before the
paper reaches its final, journal-published version. If, conversely, a mistake
is noticed only after journal publication, the author either has to live with
it, or issue an often stigmatising correction.
A final possibility is to upload a
preprint that one does not want to publish. This could include preliminary
work, or papers that have been rejected repeatedly by traditional journals.
Preliminary work could be based on research directions which did not work out
for whatever reason. This would inform other researchers who might be thinking
of going in the same direction of potential issues with a given approach: this,
in turn, would stop them from wasting their resources by doing the same thing
only to find out, too, that it doesn’t work.
Uploading papers that have been
repeatedly rejected is a more hairy issue. Here, it is important, for the
authors, to consider why the paper has been rejected. Sometimes, papers really
are fundamentally flawed. They could be p-hacked,
contain fabricated data, or errors in the analyses; theory and interpretation
could be based on non sequiturs or be presented in a biased way. Such papers
have no place in the academic literature. But there are other issues that might
make a paper unsuitable for publication in a traditional journal, but still
useful for others to know about. For example, one might run an experiment on a
theoretically or practically important association, and find that a one’s
measure is unreliable. In such a scenario, a null result is difficult to
interpret, but it is important that colleagues know about this, so they can
avoid using this measure in their own work. Or, one might have run into
practical obstacles in participant recruitment, and failed to get a
sufficiently large sample size. Again, it is difficult to draw conclusions from
such studies, but if the details of this experiment are publically available,
this data can be included in meta-analysis. This can be critical for research
questions which concern a special population that is difficult to recruit, and
in fact may be the only way in which conducting such research is possible.
With traditional journals, one can
also be simply unlucky with reviewers. The fact that luck is a huge component
in journals’ decisions can be exemplified with a paper of mine, that was
rejected as being “irritating” and “nonsense” from one journal, and accepted
with minor revisions by another one. Alternatively, one may find it difficult
to find a perfectly matching journal for a paper. I have another anecdote as an
example of this: After one paper of mine was rejected by three different
journals, I uploaded a preprint. A week later, I had received two emails from
colleagues with suggestions about journals that could be interested in this
specific paper, and two months later the paper was accepted by the first of
these journals with minor revisions.
The possibility of uploading
unpublishable work is probably the most controversial point about preprints.
Traditional journals are considered to give a paper a seal of approval: a
guarantee of quality, as reflected by positive reports of expert reviewers. In
contrast, anyone can publish anything as a preprint. If both preprints and
journal articles are floating around on the web, it could be difficult,
especially for people who are not experts in the field (including journalists,
or people who are directly affected by the research, such as patients reading
about a potential treatment), to determine which they can trust. This is indeed
a concern – however, I maintain that it is an open empirical question whether
or not the increase in preprint will exacerbate the spreading of
misinformation.
The fact is that traditional
journals’ peer review is not perfect. Hardly anyone would contest this:
fundamentally flawed papers sometimes get published, and good, sound papers
sometimes get repeatedly rejected. Thus, even papers published in traditional
journals are a mixture of good and bad papers. In addition, there are the
notorious predatory journals, that accept any paper against a fee, and publish
it under the appearance of being peer reviewed. These may not fool persons who
are experienced with academia, but journalists and consumers may find this
confusing.
The point stands that the increase
in preprints may increase the ratio of bad to good papers. But perhaps this
calls for increased caution in trusting what we read: the probability that a
given paper is bad is definitely above zero, regardless of whether it has been
published as a preprint or in a traditional journal. Maybe, just maybe, the
increase of preprints will lead to increased caution in evaluating papers based
on their own merit, rather than the journal it was published in. Researchers
would become more critical of the papers that they read, and post-publication
peer review may increase in importance. And maybe, just maybe, an additional
bonus will lie in the realisation that we as researchers need to become better
at sharing our research with the general public in a way that provides a clear
explanation of our work and doesn’t overhype our results.
Conclusion
I love preprints. They are easy,
allow for fast publication of our work, and encourage openness and a dynamic
approach to science, where publications reflect ongoing discussions in the
scientific community. This is not to say that I hate traditional peer review. I
like peer review: I have often received very helpful comments from which I have
learned about statistics, theory building, and got a broader picture of the
views held by colleagues outside of the lab. Such comments are fundamental for
the development of high-quality science.
But: Let’s have such conversations
in public, rather than in anonymous email threads moderated by the editor, so
that everyone can benefit. Emphasising the nature of science as an open
dialogue may be the biggest advantage of preprints.
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1 This differs from
journal to journal. For specific journals’ policies on this issue, see here.
