Open Research in Practice: responding to peer review with GitHub

I wrote a tweet last week that got a bit of unexpected (but welcome) attention;

I got a number of retweets and replies in response, including:

https://twitter.com/chadkoh/statuses/433012506097745920

https://twitter.com/n3siy/status/433462895116943360

The answers are: Yes, yes, yes and yes. I thought I’d respond in more detail and pen some short reflections on github, collaboration and open research.

The backstory; I had submitted a short paper (co-authored with my colleague David Matthews from the Maths department) to a conference workshop (WWW2014: Social Machines). While the paper was accepted (yay!), the reviewers had suggested a number of substantial revisions. Since the whole thing had to be written in Latex, with various associated style, bibliography and other files, and version control was important, we decided to create a github repo for the revision process. I’d seen Github used for paper authoring before by another colleague and wanted to try it out.

Besides version control, we also decided to make use of other features of Github, including ‘issues’. I took the long list of reviewer comments and filed them as a new issue. We then separated these out into themes which were given their own sub-issues. From here, we could clearly see what needed changing, and discuss how we were going to do it. Finally, once we were satisfied with an issue, that could be closed.

At first I considered making the repository private – I was a little bit nervous to put all the reviewer comments up on a public repo, especially as some were fairly critical of our first draft (although, in hindsight, entirely fair). In the end, we opted for the open approach – that way, if anyone is interested they can see the process we went through. While I doubt anyone will be interested in such a level of detail for this paper, opening up the paper revision process as a matter of principle is probably a good idea.

With the movement to open up the ‘grey literature’ of science – preliminary data, unfinished papers, failed experiments – it seems logical to extend this to the post-peer-review revision process. For very popular and / or controversial papers, it would be interesting to see how authors have dealt with reviewer comments. It could help provide context for subsequent debates and responses, as well as demystify what can be a strange and scary process for early-career researchers like myself.

I’m sure there are plenty of people more steeped in the ways of open science who’ve given this a lot more thought. New services like FigShare, and open access publishers like PLoS and PeerJ, are experimenting with opening up all the whole process of academic publishing. There are also dedicated paper authoring tools that extend on git-like functionality – next time, I’d like to try one of the collaborative web-based Latex editors like ShareLatex or WriteLatex. Either way, I’d recommend adopting git or something git-like, for co-authoring papers and the post-peer-review revision process. The future of open peer review looks bright – and integrating this with an open, collaborative revision process is a no-brainer.

Next on my reading list for this topic is this book on the future of academic publishing by Kathleen FitzPatrick – Planned Obsolescence
— UPDATE: Chad Kohalyk just alerted me to a relevant new feature rolled out by Github yesterday – a better way to track diffs in rendered prose. Thanks!