Two things have become abundantly clear to us over the last three years:
- We are overwhelmed with observations that are novel and worthy of publication. Our collection is chock-a-block of undescribed/unnamed species, for example, and many of the structures and their associated phenotypes we examine and image are new to science. Unfortunately, …
- We are painfully slow to publish anything. It takes time to document these observations and describe new species with the proper level of rigor. Take our recent masterpiece on male genitalia in Ceraphronoidea (open access!)—this millstone took FIVE LONG YEARS to rise up like a phoenix from the chaos of our brains, lab notebooks, whiteboard chicken scratches, and miscellaneous Post-its®. I remember a lab meeting back in 2011 or so, when we went around the circle to get updates from each member. I tallied it up at the end, and we were working collectively on almost 20 manuscripts. I think only five or six have actually made it to the final stage.
One solution is to give up on our family lives, move the Frost to a secluded, undisclosed location, become entomomonks, and do nothing but write manifesto after manifesto. Another, slightly more realistic scenario is to recruit an army of grad students and postdocs. (We’ve been fortunate with grants lately, true, but not that fortunate.) Or we could hop on the preprint bandwagon and just start releasing these ideas and observations into the wild. And, in fact, that’s what we’re doing.
Check out this Project Top Secret(ion) post from June 18th again. We’ve converted this post into a journal-like article, parked a copy in the bioRχiv repository, and added a “how to cite” section to the blog post. Someone can read about it, comment on it, “like” it, and robustly cite it. At his very moment I am running István’s post about glands in Megalyra through the same process. Ultimately, all posts in our Project Snodgrass and Project Top Secret(ion) series will be made available as preprints for people to cite, evaluate, and even build upon. And we’ll do the same for a new “Research Symbiosis” series, which introduces you all to the numerous collaborations ongoing at the Frost.
This strategy of making results available early isn’t novel, even for us. We’ve been putting images and other data in figshare and in Penn State’s ScholarSphere for a couple years now—see this Megalyra gland CLSM video or this Beatty manuscript—in the hopes that others will use them. And some of our close collaborators, e.g., João Araújo and colleagues, including David Hughes, have used bioRχiv already. We recognize, however, that many of our blog posts are quasi-manuscripts, containing new, exciting observations and, in some cases, novel methodology. They warrant a stable and more professional venue.
Update: Here’s another one that came out right after I published this post!
Mikó I, Deans AR. (2014) The second axillary in Hymenoptera. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e428v1 DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.428v1
João Araújo says
Interesting note Andy. It’s indeed a great tool to spread out new stuffs that is still under construction or waiting the long reviews…