When I first taught this course, pre-print servers, or other online resources for sharing research reports and manuscripts, were not as popular or well known as they are today (Spring 2023). My goal with this class was to introduce the idea of sharing manuscripts prior to/after publication as well in lieu of publication in a peer reviewed journal. I showed them a few different options available at the time, including the one hosted by the library system at Western University (where we are located).

Overall the students seemed concerned about how it would be perceived to share a manuscript publicly before it was accepted for publication at a peer reviewed journal (e.g., “will the journal want to publish my paper if I have already “published” it?”). As part of this discussion I showed them sherpa romeo, a site that allows one to view the open access policies of a lot of journals and thus help one determine if they can/should share a preprint of a manuscript. The students were also concerned, however, with sharing a copy of the paper that was accepted for publication in case the journal would forbid this practice (and maybe even revoke acceptance of a manuscript); sherpa romeo is helpful here as well. A lot of fear associated with sharing outside the mainstream publication system! Fair enough, that is why I teach this material in the class and have an open discussion where I make sure to listen to the concerns of the students.

In this class I also discuss thinking beyond the typical research report as material worthy of sharing publicly. For example, stimuli used in the research that will not be part of the manuscript but others may want to use for their own research. I discussed how they could share this material in such a way that it could be both used but also cited. It was appealing to the students to think that they could have aspects of their research beyond the manuscript itself appear in, for example, google scholar and also be cited. The same goes for unique methods as well as data sets. Lastly, we discussed the idea of open peer review and associated pros and cons.

I have been sharing preprints for many years now, mostly (but not exclusively) on psyarxiv. Most of the manuscripts shared their are now published in peer reviewed journals, but some are not. For example, here is a brief paper now published at the Journal of Research in Personality that is also on psyarxiv. Google scholar tells me the published paper has been cited a whopping 4 times. But as you can see on psyarxiv it has been downloaded over 2000 times to date. This may mean absolutely nothing, but perhaps it means that the paper is having an impact not measured by citations alone. Also, you can see on psyarxiv that after the paper is published in a peer reviewed journal the author(s) can update the preprint with the published DOI. One example of a manuscript that exists only as a preprint focuses on a qualitative analysis of “ghosting” (in this case relationship dissolution by ending all contact with a partner) that was lead by former awesome graduate student Rebecca Koessler. This paper has been downloaded over 3000 times, suggesting it has been helpful in some way to others; if it had remained tucked away in our hard drives only it would obviously not have had this level of attention. Interestingly enough this preprint has also been cited 11 times according to Google scholar. From this perspective it was therefore of value to share this research as a preprint even though it was not published in a peer reviewed journal. My approach to open science practices has been to lead by example, so I appreciate that my own experiences with sharing preprints has resulted in noticeable attention to the research when the paper is published in a peer reviewed journal or not. I will likely use these papers, and others, as examples of sharing preprints if I teach this course again.