# 12. Publishing your research

When your research report is done, make an effort to reach the audience that you addressed in the introduction. Make your research available to this audience. Upload a pdf of your report to a publicly available archive, such as SocArxiv or PsyArxiv. These are excellent platforms to share your research because they are free to use and openly accessible by anyone. Also they are not owned by commercial corporations, but by a nonprofit organization. They do not require readers to register themselves on the platform or pay a fee to read your work.

Regardless of the type of research you have done or the publication format you strive for, it is a good idea to create a project on the Open Science Framework for your research. I’ve created a template at https://osf.io/3g7e5/ that you can duplicate. You can post all materials, the data, the code or analysis script, and the research report on the page. The research report is sometimes referred to as a ‘preprint’ – the text before it is reviewed.

Sharing the research report with the public is good for you because your work will reach a wider audience. Put your name and date on the front page so that others can cite your work. Assign a DOI, which makes your work traceable and citable. You can assign a separate DOI to each table and figure, which makes them traceable and citable independent of the research paper. Give your text a license that fits your purposes. This text, for instance, has a CC – BY – NC – ND license, which allows everybody to download it and share it with others, as long as I am credited as the author, and the work is not changed, and not distributed commercially.

Share the data you collected so that others can use it too, for instance on Dataverse https://dataverse.org/ or the Open Science Framework, https://osf.io/. Assign a DOI to your data so that others can cite it and give you credit for the work you did. But be careful when sharing data. Before you send a data set to others and before you share it online through a platform like OSF, make sure you are allowed to do so. Also make sure you remove all personal information about the participants and the interviewers from the file. Note that an IP address is also personal information. Further guidelines on how to document data and code are here.

If you wrote a thesis at a university, your library may have an automatic archiving system that makes your work available. Usually it takes until after your graduation before your thesis is published. So if you would like to get feedback before that time, consider posting your work to an open archive.

If you wrote an empirical research paper, you may want to submit it to a journal for peer review and publication. Invite your supervisor to help you with this. You should know that getting your work published may take a long time. Depending on the discipline, the toughness of the review process and the frequency with which the journal publishes papers, getting from submission to an eventual publication in print will take at least three months. In the more typical scenario, it will take at least one and sometimes two or even three rounds of revisions and that will take about a year’s time. That is, if you even get a chance to revise your paper. In the worst case, you get a ‘desk-reject’: a message from the editors that they do not send out your paper for review. If your paper is sent out for review, and the reviewers have mercy, you will get a Revise and Resubmit (‘R&R’): a lengthy letter with lots of detailed comments, suggestions and requests for changes in your manuscript.

- “How should I respond to strong criticism?”

First of all, don’t panic. Do not let yourself be discouraged by the criticism of the reviewers. Even experienced researchers like myself rarely get through the review process easily. Fierce evaluations are the rule rather than the exception. So if you get tough questions, see them as an opportunity to improve your paper. You may be able to get your research published if you manage to address the issues raised by the reviewers.

Second, take the suggestions seriously, and think carefully about each suggestion. Talk to your co-authors about the substantive and methodological issues that the reviewers suggest should be improved. You should not blindly follow each and every suggestion that a reviewer gives. Sometimes the suggestions of reviewers are just too much work, impossible to carry out, or even incorrect. In the best case, the editor has carefully read the reviews, and will give you some guidance about which suggestions to follow and which to ignore. More commonly, however, the editor does not voice her own opinion about the suggestions of reviewers, and lets you sort out the sense from the nonsense yourself. In any case, explain clearly what you have changed in the revised version of your manuscript.

Write a polite letter to the editor explaining what you did in response to each of the issues raised by the reviewers. Repeat each issue raised in the letter, and describe what you have done to address the issue, referring to the exact location in your revised manuscript. This is helpful to reviewers and editors because they have less trouble checking your revision.