When researchers Danika Pfeiffer, Austin Thompson, Alisa Baron, Collin Brice, Brittany Ciullo, Micah E. Hirsch, Helen Long, and Andrea Ford posted their latest study on EdArXiv, a preprint server hosted on the Open Science Framework (OSF), they didn’t expect to inspire new research almost immediately. Soon after sharing their manuscript, another researcher reached out seeking guidance on designing a qualitative study—an example of how open scholarship can extend beyond publication to directly support others’ work.
As members of CSDisseminate—a collaborative, volunteer-based working group promoting open science practices in Communication Sciences and Disorders (CSD)—the team views preprints as both a professional commitment and a practical way to accelerate research progress. Many began their careers as speech-language pathologists or audiologists and know firsthand how paywalls and limited access can slow the translation of evidence into clinical practice.
The research team’s recent study explores faculty perceptions of open science across career stages, revealing both enthusiasm for a “culture shift” in academia and persistent structural barriers that make it difficult to adopt open practices. In the following Q&A, the team reflects on how preprints and open sharing can spark new collaborations, boost visibility, provide early feedback, and help other researchers navigate their own projects—demonstrating the benefits of open science in CSD and other fields.
Q: To start, could you briefly describe your study and share what inspired you to explore faculty perceptions of open science within Communication Sciences & Disorders?
We are a working group of researchers and clinicians dedicated to disseminating knowledge about open science (OS) practices to clinicians and researchers in Communication Sciences and Disorders (CSD) and beyond. One of the ways we collaborate is by conducting research related to the use of OS practices in our field. This study is our most recent collaborative research project and was conducted to inform our future development of OS trainings and resources for clinicians and researchers in our discipline, and beyond.
In CSD, researchers often work with low-incidence populations, and many believe this limits their ability to engage in OS practices. Therefore, we wanted to examine this assumption and other views toward OS practices across career stages in our field. Building on our previous study on Assistant Professors’ perceptions of OS, this qualitative study focused on Associate and Full Professors. We conducted virtual focus groups and identified many overlaps in perceptions of these faculty members with the Assistant Professors we interviewed in our previous study. These included perceptions that: (a) OS could have a positive impact on their career as well as the field of CSD in general, and (b) there are both individual-level factors (e.g., knowledge, experience) and systemic-level factors (e.g., resources, academic systems and policies) that act as barriers and/or facilitators to their use of OS practices.
At the same time, the Associate and Full Professors also expressed several novel ideas related to the adoption and implementation of OS practices from their perspective at higher tenure ranks. These included the importance of engaging clinicians and clinical populations in OS and barriers to engaging in OS practices related to intellectual property ownership and competition. They also gave some recommendations for enhancing implementation of OS practices, such as providing trainings for clinicians and researchers and incentivizing researchers to engage in OS practices. Another interesting perspective across these professors was the need for a “culture shift” in academia toward open science that is uniquely different from the way things have been done in the field for a while. They are ready to contribute to this shift, but need help to do so.
Q: Can you share a bit about the research team’s experiences with open science? What first drew you to open scholarship practices?
Individuals on our team have varying levels of experience with OS. We are all relatively early in our careers in academia and have embraced learning about practices that can enhance the reproducibility of our work and its accessibility to practicing clinicians in our field. Some of us were exposed to OS early in our training by our mentors, which we think speaks volumes about how important it is to get students learning to use OS early in their training. Many members of our team started as clinically-focused speech-language pathologists or audiologists, so we also often faced paywalls when trying to read and implement the latest evidence-based practices with clients. As a result, we recognize the systemic issues creating the research-to-practice gap of approximately 17 years. We hope that our efforts not only help shift the culture of OS in researchers, but also help clinicians put research findings into practice much sooner.
Q: What motivated you to share your work as a preprint on EdArXiv?
As members of CSDisseminate, we strive to use OS practices in all of our peer-reviewed publications to “practice what we preach!” We choose to share our work as preprints because we think it’s a great way to share the work we’re doing and elicit feedback from others in our field. We also appreciate that on EdArXiv we can upload multiple versions of the same manuscript. This allows others to see the changes we’ve made throughout the peer review process.
Q: Have you noticed any impact—such as visibility, feedback, or collaboration opportunities—since posting this preprint?
After posting our preprint, we were contacted by a researcher who was interested in doing a qualitative focus group study. She reached out to see if we’d be willing to share some of our study materials (e.g., IRB language, study protocol) to help her inform and develop her own project. It’s rewarding to see how sharing our work openly can support others in designing their research.
We’ve also noticed an impact on the visibility of our work from posting preprints in the past. For example, we have formed collaborations with colleagues in the field of special education who are also doing work to enhance the use of OS practices. We have now written a couple of manuscripts related to OS together.
Q: What do you see as the main benefits and/or challenges of using preprints in your field?
One of the main benefits includes receiving a DOI for your work while it undergoes peer review. This is great to have for those of us on the tenure track who need to report the work we are doing on a regular basis on our CVs and grant applications that require DOIs in order to be included on NIH Biosketches, for example. It is also great that preprints receive a timestamp to prevent any hesitations about possible ‘scooping’ of ideas or data. Some of our research team has also conducted work in our field, which found that articles with preprints had slightly higher citations and significantly more online attention than paywalled papers. We also appreciate the ability to be able to publicly share the accepted version of our preprints instead of paying to make our research open with article processing fees, so that our research funds can be put to other uses.
Some of the main drawbacks include the time it takes to learn and complete the steps to post the preprint and postprint versions of the manuscript. Another potential drawback is that some journals will not review a manuscript if it has been posted as a preprint. We talk to a lot of scientists who are afraid to share preprints because of publisher policies around embargos, so one of our most common education topics people love to learn from us about is how to navigate publisher policies to share preprints (and postprints) legally, and without cost to either the author or reader.
Finally, another challenge is that clinicians, who make up a large portion of our field’s readership, may not yet be familiar with what preprints and postprints are. Many of us have started teaching the speech-language pathology graduate students that we work with about these concepts so they can better access and critically evaluate research, and understand what level of peer review a manuscript (preprint vs. postprint) has undergone.
Q: What advice would you give to other researchers who are considering sharing their work as a preprint?
We encourage researchers to consider sharing their work as preprints-and don’t forget to update it to the final version once accepted! It’s a great way to potentially enhance visibility of your work, elicit feedback from your peers in the field, and may lead to new collaborations. While there are many potential benefits, it’s very important to read the policies of the journal that you are planning to submit your manuscript to ahead of time to ensure that your work will indeed be sent out for peer review. Every publisher is different, but their websites make it pretty clear how to navigate preprinting.
Q: Is there anything else you would like readers to know about your study, or your experience using OSF?
We are really grateful to the Center for Open Science for all of the great work it does to support researchers in engaging in OS. OSF has been our “go-to” place for sharing our projects for the past few years, and we often recommend it to our colleagues! We also really appreciate the ability to connect preprints to the preregistration and data materials within one project to make using OS across the research cycle that much easier for us.