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Impact is an Inclusive Goal- Part 1
Whether it is increasing access to reliable information in the wake of a pandemic or ensuring more farmers use agricultural insurance, our ultimate aim is to make people’s lives better in real and tangible ways that matter to them. We do this by trying to understand their contexts, cultures, daily patterns and behaviors. We read past research, stored in journals, to help us understand what is already known and documented. Without access to research efforts could be repetitive, redundant or even irrelevant.
Most journals make their money by selling access to their papers. This means if your institution can’t afford to pay journal fees then you can’t use or build upon the papers that a journal publishes. Journals justify these fees by claiming they can pick the good science from the bad through the process of peer review. While this can add value, it is expensive, time-consuming, capricious, and, in the worst cases, rife with bias and petty politics. For knowledge workers it simply means that the system put in place to curate and disseminate their work often results in huge delays in getting the work out. Then, when it is finally published, it often stays locked behind a paywall, inaccessible to the majority of the global population.
Working with pre-prints to increase access to research.
Preprints — sometimes called working papers — exist to solve this problem. Before the internet these documents were an author’s copy of the article before the journal typeset, printed and bound the article into a journal issue. Today they are typically word documents or PDFs before a journal’s copy-editors clean up the text and lay it out in the journal’s official style. An accepted copy of an article — that is, the copy after any edits following peer review, but before any journal copy-editing — can serve as a preprint. This can then be posted on public facing preprint servers, which assign a digital object identifier (DOI) to the document, ensuring it is indexed in a variety of scholarly databases to be discovered by anyone looking for it.
Preprint servers don’t have paywalls. Anyone can simply visit the site and download the paper. PsyArxXiv and MetaArXiv are the most relevant servers to behavioral science. PsyArXiv is a repository for psychology research and hosts all kinds of psychology-oriented preprints. MetaArXiv is a repository for research on research, or meta-research, and usually hosts research on how to improve scientific practice. Other well-known preprint servers include bioRxiv, SocArXiv, EdArXiv, SSRN, and AfricArXiv. These repositories have enabled researchers to efficiently build on existing work and make rapid progress building an ever growing, shared knowledge base of the behavioral sciences.
Posting a preprint on a server is a fairly straightforward process that involves uploading the PDF to a server, filling in author related and other details, and clicking submit. If the final paper is published in a scientific journal, one can add the DOI for the published paper to the preprint so that scholarly databases can link the preprint to the final paper. The preprint will then show up as an option to read in most scholarly databases where the published paper appears.
Preprints offer a low-cost method to plug into the academic system and circumvent the time-consuming process of publication through journals. The feedback provided to preprints through comments and public conversation often lays the groundwork for future academic collaborations. They also allow work to be disseminated faster and to a broader array of audiences — including policymakers and nonprofit researchers who may not have ready access to a broad array of subscriptions to scientific journals.
Most scientific journals actually encourage and allow preprints to be posted to servers as long as the author posts the version before final copy-edits are made to the manuscript. However, organizations may often be restricted by client agreements and legal non-disclosure agreements. Sherpa Romeo aggregates, analyses, and archives journal policies around preprints and publisher open access and provides summaries of these policies on a journal-by-journal basis.
The truth is, most of the people who cannot afford journal access are in the global south. The lack of public accessibility to research papers and scientific journals poses an unevenly distributed problem to the process of knowledge construction. Preprints make science accessible, open and collaborative — enabling the rapid dissemination of work via an affordable, low-cost mechanism.
Below is a list of working papers and preprints published by the Culture, Research Ethics, and Methods (CREME) team and Busara:
- Generalizing with equity: the Busara research agenda on contextualisation and cross-cultural measurement in the Global South
- Participant voice first: the Busara research agenda on ethical research in the Global South
- Replicable quality across every channel: the Busara research agenda on methods in the Global South
- An improved measure for the Strength of Social Gender Norms (SSGN) developed for adolescents in Uttar Pradesh, India
- Psychology should generalize from — not just to — Africa
- Busara’s Low Income Panel
- Are Small Effects the Indispensable Foundation for a Cumulative Psychological Science? A Reply to Götz et al. (2022)
This blog is part of Busara’s agenda to do research on research, or meta-research. This agenda seeks to identify problems in the behavioral science research process, especially as it happens in the Global South, and develop solutions to any problems we find. Currently, our meta-research agenda is focused on the topics of Culture, Research Ethics, and MEthods (CREME).
