Preserving Research | The Scientist Magazine®

"As a graduate student in Harvard’s organismic and evolutionary biology department in the early 2000s, I wanted to publicly share all of the research that went into my doctoral thesis in order to contribute to the small body of scientific literature on the little-known group of marine arthropods I studied, sea spiders. However, after I published a few reports and successfully defended my PhD, my drive to submit the final chapter of my thesis to a journal dissolved because of the expense and time involved. Yet, on the rare occasions when researchers have asked to see it, I regretted that it languished on my bookshelf. Although the chapter is far from earth-shattering, it might provide a stepping stone for another biologist. 'There is a need for science to be communicated faster to other researchers and the public, so by putting manuscripts online in places like the [preprint server] arXiv, biologists can quickly disseminate their results and get feedback,' says Dmitri Petrov, an evolutionary biologist at Stanford University. 'Sometimes researchers make careful observations that might not tell a thrilling narrative,' but could still save another researcher valuable time re-creating the same experiment, he adds. 'It’s wonderful to put those observations online and to provide them for free.' Luckily, sharing is cheaper and faster now that online, open-access collections for biology are flourishing as researchers realize the benefits of uploading unpublished reports of negative results, observations, grant applications, protocol notes, and yes, their unpublished theses onto the Web for others to peruse. In January, I finally uploaded my thesis chapter on sea spider metamorphosis onto several sites. Within 3 weeks, a zoologist from Germany e-mailed me to ask how to cite it and whether I was still following that line of study. In addition, unpublished uploads may directly contribute to one’s career. This year, the National Science Foundation announced that grant reviewers would take note of citable and accessible 'products' in addition to publications. Because online repositories grant unpublished reports a digital object identifier, or DOI, that can be referenced in a citation, these uploads may now improve a scientist’s reputation. Submission is typically free and relatively simple. However, how readable, usable, and findable the report is to others remains up to you. In order to explore how several online repositories function, I uploaded my thesis chapter as a test, and spoke with experts who have turned to the Web for similar reasons ..."