Self-archiving your data

Category: Education

In earlier days, in the absence of the Internet, it was difficult for scientists to introduce their research to a wider or global audience. However, the Internet has changed the world of academic publishing, and now it is progressing towards electronic publishing. During my PhD, I liked hearing my supervisor’s experiences when he was a graduate student. During our everyday lunch discussions, he often mentioned how different the scientific publishing used to be some 30 years ago. Manuscript submission, editor’s replies, counter-replies, printed copies of accepted manuscripts were exchanged via Post, which has changed over the past few decades; now, everything is one click away. Despite that the entire process of manuscript submission till publication, if everything goes smoothly, can easily consume 5–6 months depending on the situation. Journals asking for subscriptions restrict free availability of research material accepted by them, that is, a reader has to subscribe to the journal to gain access to journal services by paying a monthly or yearly fee or purchase the article of interest. By contrast, open access journals charge researchers or funders a reasonable fee for submitting their work but make all research material available to everyone for free. In both scenarios, you cannot skip the conventional, time-consuming processes of writing a manuscript according to journal guidelines, submitting, waiting for the verdict of journal’s peer review committee, replies from editor, then revising your manuscript according to suggested changes, wait for the re-review verdict, and finally wait till your accepted manuscript’s status changes from in press to published. What is self-archiving? It is a method where you put all your research data on the Internet, mostly maintained by certain universities in their archive systems, which can be accessed by everyone. The issues of ownership and copyright depend on when you want to archive or self-archive your data. Post-publication archiving Once your manuscript is published through a journal, you can archive your data depending on journal’s copyright policies. Some journals allow you to archive data as soon as your article is published, while other journals suggest a gap period of 6–12 months before allowing you to archive that data online. Pre-publication self-archiving In this case, you can put all your data online before the collective process of editing, peer reviewing, revising, and publishing; in other words, you are the owner of your data and you can do whatever you want to with your data. According to me, pre-publishing self-archiving will be more like becoming a blogger and advertising your work on your expenses. Also, gathering a correct audience and promoting yourself as a researcher will solely be your responsibility. The two possible scenarios I can think of to advise you to go ahead with self-archiving are as follows: 1. If you are impatient to make your data public as soon as possible, don’t agree with paying publication charges, and take full responsibility to remain active to make your research visible to a larger audience by putting it on a website. 2. If you are one of those researchers who believe in the core purpose of making your research public, which is not to gain reputation but to push science ahead, or in simple words, sharing your views with fellow scientists to improve the understanding of a particular problem by avoiding repetition of work and mistakes. In such cases, self-archiving your research data is a good option. To be honest, I personally agree with post-publishing archiving, but I do not think the scientific world is ready for such a drastic change of self-archiving. Think about all these points and your future plans and do further research before deciding to self-archive your data