I’m an Assistant Professor of Cell Biology at the University of Kansas Medical Center. Our lab studies assembly, maintenance, and regulation of a cellular antenna called the cilium. We use the flagella of a unicellular green alga as a powerful ciliary model system for most of our studies.
Around the time I was collecting the data for our lab’s first paper, I was lucky enough to stumble upon the first meeting of the preprint advocacy organization ASAPbio.org. Thankfully, this meeting was live-streamed so I could watch it from my office and participate via Twitter. As the lab had opened less than one year before, I was just beginning to develop my own strategies for where and how we would communicate our research. Throughout the meeting it became obvious to me that there was much to gain by making our research open to the public as soon as possible. There were opportunities for increased feedback, increased citation, and increased exposure for our work, to name a few.
I tested out preprints later that year by posting our first in advance of a big conference in my field. We directed those that visited our poster to the preprint and got detailed feedback from conference-attendees during the meeting. We then incorporated the excellent suggestions from experts in our field and submitted the revised manuscript to a journal. For the first time in my life, our paper was accepted without revision. We essentially went through a round of peer review on the preprint and greatly improved our manuscript prior to submission. I will likely never go back to the old model.
I also turned a journal club course at my university into a preprint journal club to help train students to analyze previously unreviewed material as well as provide additional feedback to preprint authors. Both students and authors loved it. It was a win-win!
Now, with more funding agencies allowing preprints on CVs, I am thrilled to be able to demonstrate our lab’s productivity through posting of completed manuscripts while they are making their way through the lengthy journal submission process. I feel strongly about doing this to help my trainees as well, who will have to demonstrate productivity in order to advance in their careers.
Because of the potential for increased feedback, early recognition of contributions to demonstrate productivity, and the enormous benefit to science by more rapidly advancing our field, I am a strong supporter of preprints.
ORCID – Researchgate – Twitter: @PracheeAC
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