Recently on Twitter I saw a lot of discussions about preprints, such as under the #ASAPBio hashtag, which originated in the biology community. My guess is that preprints are more or less common in different fields, and I thought it was normal for Computer Science to do it, so I couldn’t contribute anything to the topic. But I’ve encountered some doubts when I encouraged other CS students to upload their work to arXiV, so I thought I’d share my N=1 experience with preprints.
Long story short, I spent a good part of 2013 writing journal papers. I submitted three of them that year, and directly uploaded the submitted versions on arXiV. You can see my page on arXiV here.
I spent 2014 revising these papers. One paper was accepted in 2014, and two others only in 2015, when I was already a postdoc. One of the accepted papers is still in press, even though it is already 2016. I imagine it will be three years (!) between my initial submission — that really isn’t that different from the revised version — and the published version. And this is in Computer Science, a fast-moving field!
As a PhD student / postdoc / aspiring researcher, you can’t really afford such a time lag. And that is where preprints have been immensely helpful to me in different ways:
- Two of the papers were based on earlier conference papers. When I was discussing that work with other researchers (at conferences, via email), I could send them the preprint, which contained more detailed results.
- The third paper (a type of survey) was completely new, and I was a bit scared that somebody would publish something similar before me. The preprint was actually a way to assure myself that it was now documented that I came up with the idea. Again, I discussed this work with other researchers while it was already in arXiV, and even got some valuable comments, which helped me a lot when revising the paper.
- The preprints were cited (mostly by myself, but also by other researchers). After publication, I merged each preprint with the published version in Google Scholar. I don’t really have a lot of citations, but I would have had even less if the papers only became available in 2015 instead of 2013.
- I didn’t apply for jobs while I had any unpublished preprints, but if this was the case, I could put the preprints on my CV, which is more informative than simply listing the paper title with the comment “manuscripts in preparation”.
- Most journals allow this! You can check on this website what your journal’s policy is
If you are a student in Computer Science (or anything, really) and you are doubting about uploading a preprint of your recent work, I hope this might change your opinion a little bit.