PrePrints continue to increase in popularity among academics, with a number of recent blog posts highlighting their utility (from ourselves, Stephen Curry, Liz Martin-Silverstone, Tim Gowers and Mike Taylor (twice)). Given this level of interest, we thought it would be helpful to ask some of the authors of PeerJ PrePrints about their reasons for publishing their work in this way.
We will be publishing a series of these ‘guest blog posts’ over coming days, and first up we have Dorothy Bishop.
Professor Bishop is a neuropsychologist with a special interest in children’s communication disorders and is based at Oxford University. She is on the PeerJ Advisory Board and has published two preprints with us (“Problems in using text-mining and p-curve analysis to detect rate of p-hacking” and “Fine motor deficits in reading disability and language impairment: same or different?“).
Can you tell our readers a little bit about your research area?
I work in developmental neuropsychology, which is concerned with understanding the nature and causes of developmental disorders in children such as dyslexia, language impairment and autism. I also have a strong interest in methods, reproducibility and open science.
Why did you decide to submit the draft of your article(s) to PeerJ PrePrints?
Our most recent paper (“Problems in using text-mining and p-curve analysis to detect rate of p-hacking“) is concerned with a statistical method to identify questionable research practices, the p-curve, and it is a critique of a paper by Head et al that was published in PLOS Biology. We did some simulations that challenged some of the conclusions of Head et al, but we wanted to test the waters to see what reaction this elicited, both from those authors and from others. A pre-print gave us the opportunity to do that before going ahead with formal publication.
What are the benefits to you personally of publishing your work as a PeerJ PrePrint prior to any formal peer review process?
It is very useful to get feedback from experts in the field before finalising a manuscript; ultimately, it should save time, because the paper is more likely to have a smooth passage through a formal review process if you have anticipated and responded to major criticisms, and also been pointed to other relevant literature. Having said that, I don’t yet know if our paper will be accepted for publication! However, even if it is not, it has been useful to have the debate about the p-curve method out in the open, and our pre-print allowed us to put our views in the public domain in a permanent, citeable format.
What would you say to anyone who had any doubts about publishing their draft article as a PeerJ PrePrint first?
Previously I didn’t see the point of pre-prints, but after this experience, I am enthusiastic. I think it helps foster useful debate about scientific work in a way that doesn’t usually happen with conventional peer review – which is characterised by anonymity and privacy. I am still in favour of formal peer review, but preferably non-anonymised and out in the open.
We thank Professor Bishop for this guest post and we encourage you to submit the next article you are working on to PeerJ PrePrints.