What an academic misconduct accusation taught me about sharing research

"Writing this story more than a decade later has helped me to reflect on the experience with fresh eyes.

Sharing research ahead of the formal publishing process provides impact and insurance. The fear that your findings might be scooped or copied leads many researchers to work in secret. This is a mistake. Publicly posting our preliminary work enabled someone to plagiarize our research, but also exonerated us by providing a paper trail. What if the accuser had instead heard us present at a conference and copied us, leaving no documentation of our early work to point to? I continue to share all my team’s initial research outputs. Throughout my now-25-year career, this one negative experience has been vastly outweighed by countless positive outcomes of people leveraging our resources to build productively on our efforts. Today’s preprint servers and data repositories supercharge this practice, advancing dissemination while also providing a certified, date-stamped record of contributions."