© DRAFTER123/ISTOCKPHOTO.COMAs 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now that online, open-access collections for biology are flourishing as researchers realize the benefits of uploading unpublished reports of negative results, observations, grant applications, protocol notes, and yes, their unpublished theses onto the Web ...
