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.
This is the fifth post in our series of guest blog posts highlighting PeerJ PrePrint authors and for this post we spoke to Christian Althaus. Dr Althaus works at the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine (ISPM) at the University of Bern and he is a co-founder of the Swiss Meeting for Infectious Disease Dynamics (SMIDDY). He is an Academic Editor with PeerJ and has published 4 articles in PeerJ PrePrints.
Can you tell our readers a little bit about your research area?
I am a mathematical epidemiologist studying the dynamics of infectious diseases. For example, we develop mathematical models that describe the spread of sexually transmitted infections such as gonorrhea, and study how resistance evolves against antibiotic treatment. During the last year, we published timely analyses of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa and the MERS-CoV outbreak in South Korea. These studies were important for assessing the scale of the outbreaks and the effects of control interventions.
Why did you decide to submit the draft of your article(s) to PeerJ PrePrints?
Research on infectious disease outbreaks is often timely which makes it important to rapidly disseminate the results. I also aim to make all my research open access. By publishing my manuscripts as pre-prints, I ensure that the results are publicly available even if the peer-reviewed versions of the manuscripts later appear in subscription based journals. I have also published pre-prints on arXiv and biorXiv. I now prefer PeerJ PrePrints due to the modern web interface, the elegant submission portal, and the article level metrics.
What are the benefits to you personally of publishing your work as a PeerJ PrePrint prior to any formal peer review process?
As soon as I have finished a manuscript and upload it as a pre-print, I know that other researchers will be able to read and discuss it. The pre-print receives a DOI and becomes a citable unit of research. This allows other researchers to refer to the study even before it is published in a peer-reviewed journal.
What would you say to anyone who had any doubts about publishing their draft article as a PeerJ PrePrint first?
Some colleagues are afraid of being scooped before their study is getting published in a peer-review journal. I then tell them that publishing their manuscript as a pre-print might be the best way to claim their findings early on, and before the manuscript gets stuck in peer-review due whatever reasons.
We thank Dr Althaus for this guest post and we encourage you to submit the next article you are working on to PeerJ PrePrints.