Abram Hindle on his PrePrint Experiences at PeerJ

This is the sixth post in our series of guest blog posts highlighting PeerJ PrePrint authors and for this post we spoke to Abram Hindle. Dr Hindle is an assistant professor at University of Alberta’s Department of Computer Science. He researches software engineering, mining software repositories, software process recovery and green mining (the study of software change versus software power consumption). He has published 8 articles in PeerJ PrePrints.

Can you tell our readers a little bit about your research area?

I do research on software energy consumption, mining software repositories (analyzing existing software), and computer music.

Why did you decide to submit the draft of your article(s) to PeerJ PrePrints?

I work in two somewhat novel areas where reviewer expertise is quite low in software engineering: software energy consumption, and how software-engineering informs computer music. I have work that will eventually get accepted by sometimes is locked out of conferences due to lack of reviewer expertise or just plain bad luck. Publishing a preprint lets me talk with my colleagues and peers about work that is done but not yet published.

What are the benefits to you personally of publishing your work as a PeerJ PrePrint prior to any formal peer review process?

It helps me to establish that our group is doing something. At MSR 2015, for example, another author was presenting his work and he cited one of our works that was published as a PeerJ PrePrint.

What would you say to anyone who had any doubts about publishing their draft article as a PeerJ PrePrint first?

PeerJ PrePrints are indexed and promoted, they are likely to reach more readership than an preprint sitting on your hard drive.

We thank Dr Hindle for this guest post and we encourage you to submit the next article you are working on to PeerJ PrePrints.