Thread by @dsquintana

Last year I posted a preprint.

Doing this set off a chain of events that convinced me I should post a preprint for ALL my manuscripts.

Here’s my story (1/17)

First, some background.

Over the past few years, I’ve become interested in using Bayesian inference to complement my frequentist inferences. So, I put together a short presentation on Bayesian alternatives for NHST for my research group. (2/17)

Rather than limiting my presentation to the people that attended, I posted the slide deck on @OSFramework (OSF), so that anyone could access it. I’m ALWAYS looking for ways to repurpose my work for different mediums, so posting these slides online fit the bill nicely. (3/17)

I also shared a link to the slide deck on Twitter, which got a fair bit of attention. Given the interest, I decided to turn this into a paper. I worked with a colleague at my centre and posted a preprint of the paper on OSF, sharing this on twitter and Facebook (4/17)

Like the slide deck, the preprint also proved to be popular. I was pretty pleased with this, thinking I was onto a really good thing. (5/17)

But then came the critical comments.

To be honest, this shook me a little. I’m accustomed to having my work critiqued, but this was always been behind the walls of peer review. (6/17)

But here’s the thing about public criticism. Others can judge the quality of these critiques, because they’re public. This means that people (in general) carefully consider their comments, which means they’re *usually* correct. (7/17)

Would you rather write a weak preprint, which can be publicly evaluated and corrected before journal submission, or write a weak paper (that sneaks past peer review), which will be publicly critiqued AFTER publication, leaving no room for revision? Easy choice (8/17)

I looked carefully into all these comments, and of course all these people were correct. I missed key references, included some sloppy stats, and said other things that were flat out incorrect. (9/17)

As it turned out, my original co-author took up a great industry opportunity, so he wasn’t able to contribute to the revision. So I asked @wdonald_1985, who was one of people who critiqued the paper, to join me as a co-author to help improve the paper (10/17)

I was stoked he agreed, as he had lots of experience in this area. So we got to work and updated the paper in response to all the comments I received (11/17)

We then sent it to a Fancy Journal, and it got sent out for review! 😀

But we got rejected 🙁 Pretty much a word limitation problem, in that we didn’t have enough words to say what we needed to say (12/17)

Now the paper is under review elsewhere 🤞 We also got some great suggestions from the reviews received from the Fancy Journal, which we integrated in the updated paper (13/17)

Here’s a link to the preprint,
if you’re interested osf.io/wun5v/ As the @OSFramework preprint server includes versioning, you can see how the paper has evolved over time. This actually became one of the top 100 viewed OSF preprints in 2017 🎉 (14/17)

Our current publication system is poorly set up to correct papers. Until this changes, it’s much easier to correct errors *before* submission, because errors are commonly missed by reviewers and editors — even the ‘classic’ papers 🥣 medium.com/@jamesheathers… (15/17)

As a result of this experience, I’m now submitting all my papers for which I’m first or senior author as preprints before journal submission, and encouraging first/senior authors of papers I co-author to do the same (16/17)

Getting feedback is just one of the MANY benefits of preprints. Check out @ASAPbio_’s FAQ page for more asapbio.org/preprint-info/… & have a listen to our @hertzpodcast interview with @jessicapolka (Director of ASAPbio) soundcloud.com/everything-her… (17/17)