In this case study, Sebastian Karcher and Diana Kapiszewski talk about their experience posting their research on APSA Preprints, the first partner area on our new early and open research platform Cambridge Open Engage.

In June 2019, we submitted a short paper, “Openness in Practice in Qualitative Research,” for review as part of a symposium being proposed for publication in PS: Political Science. The paper provides what we believe is an important nudge to the debate about qualitative transparency: instead of reprising the pros and cons of transparency for qualitative research, we consider and promote the many innovative ways in which scholars are already making their qualitative work more transparent.

Across political science’s empirical subfields (and, indeed, in many other social science disciplines), researchers who generate and deploy qualitative data face similar challenges as they pursue transparency. As such, we believe that our paper will have broad, multi-disciplinary appeal, and so wanted to make it available quickly. With the encouragement of the proposed symposium’s guest editors, in June 2019, we published a copy of the piece on APSA Preprints – one of the first preprints to appear on the platform while it was still in beta.

 

Interacting with the Platform

Despite the preprints website being in a relatively early state when Sebastian uploaded the working paper, the experience was fairly smooth – “quick, easy, and free” as APSA suggests. Perhaps more importantly, the resulting preprint was quite elegant: It featured usage metrics, excellent metadata for reference managers like Zotero, and the option to quickly generate a citation in a plethora of styles as well as a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for reliable citation. In the spirit of open science, Sebastian tweeted about his experience:

 

Just submitted first WP to @APSAtweets new preprint platform: https://t.co/MCrpvZ89eG built by @CambridgeUP Some thoughts: 1/n

— Sebastian Karcher (@adam42smith) June 11, 2019

 

Soon thereafter, he was approached by Cambridge University Press’s Cambridge Open Engage team to discuss some of the issues he raised. Several of his criticisms, most importantly the ability to change the order of authors, were promptly addressed by the technical team. It also proved quite easy to replace the original version of the preprint with an updated version in October 2019 after it was thoroughly revised (and its title changed to “Transparency in Practice in Qualitative Research”) based on a first round of peer review.

 

Making an Impact

While there are many reasons to publish manuscripts early as preprints, two stand out: To get feedback prior to formal publication (i.e., when one can still integrate that feedback into one’s work); and to reach a broad audience even prior to formal publication. Posting our paper to APSA Preprints afforded us both. Shortly after posting the paper, we noticed on Twitter that it was going to be discussed at Leeds University’s (UK) ReproducibiliTea, a recurring event put on by the library and dedicated to discussing issues related to research transparency. Sebastian was able to videocall into the event and discuss the paper with the participants, receiving valuable input that contributed to our revisions to the piece.

Perhaps more importantly still is how many people have taken notice of the piece. With almost 2,000 abstract views and 700 downloads, it is receiving levels of attention similar to those garnered by articles published in influential journals. To put these numbers in perspective, they are higher than those for views and downloads to date for almost any article appearing in the October 2019 issue of PS: Political Science^[1], all of which were first published online between May and August 2019.

In short, publishing on APSA Preprints helped our work to have more impact, earlier, on a critical social science debate than it might otherwise have had. And, of course, publishing a preprint in no way negatively affected our ability to publish our piece in a peer-reviewed journal; to the contrary, doing so enabled us to receive and incorporate valuable input that may have increased the chances of our piece being accepted for publication in PS (now forthcoming).

 

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^[1] The exceptions are the widely discussed Key, Ellen M., and Jane Lawrence Sumner. 2019. “You Research Like a Girl: Gendered Research Agendas and Their Implications.” PS: Political Science & Politics 52 (4): 663–68. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096519000945 and Zigerell, L. J. 2019. “Left Unchecked: Political Hegemony in Political Science and the Flaws It Can Cause.” PS: Political Science & Politics 52 (4): 720–23. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096519000854.