Pros and cons of posting unpublished work online?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

Is it advisable to post unpublished manuscripts online (assuming one has already perfected them based on much feedback from many colleagues)? I have noticed that some philosophers do this, but most don't. What are the pros and cons?

Good questions, and I'm not entirely sure.

What does everyone think?

Comments

[me]

There is a lot of disagreement on this. But I would strongly urge early career people (even late career ones) to NOT put unrefereed work on the web. If it is flawed, it will make you look bad (and I do not mean flawed in the sense in which many published papers are mistaken). People often inadvertently post some really bad stuff on-line.
To add to this, I was involved in a search at one place, and one my trollish colleagues trolled around and found something on the web that she then used against an applicant. Others (even me) could have tried to defend the applicant, but we have to pick our battles, and we have limited time, and an endless pile of good applicants, so no one did. Make of that what you will.

[Bill V.]

Some of the differences of opinion about publicly posting work in progress are subfield dependent.

In philosophy of science, it is not too uncommon. In the last ten years, 6,600 papers have been posted at https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/, which was expressly conceived as an analogue to arXiv.org, the physical sciences preprint repository. Most of those are preprints in the technical sense that they have been accepted by a journal but not yet published. But some (less that 10%, just eyeballing it) are papers that are trying to garner some engagement and feedback from the community, before hopefully becoming refereed articles in the future. It is also a handy way to post penultimate pre-publication drafts of chapters that will appear in expensive/hard to get books, increasing the chance that others will encounter your work. I could also see it as a place to park a "dead" paper that you have given up on trying to publish but which might still be of interest to someone.

I've heard two additional concerns about posting un-refereed work, besides the possibility already mentioned in the thread that unfinished work might make you look bad. One is that this practice can undermine the double-blind refereeing process (e.g., if a referee searches for a string of text and finds the preprint); the other is that it can diminish the number of referees available who can say they don't already know the work. The latter is definitely a problem if your subfield is small.

[Richard Y Chappell]

The advantage of sharing unpublished (and even unpolished!) work online is that others may read and engage with it (esp. if you highlight it on social media). You might reasonably want that for its own sake, or because you hope to get useful feedback, raise your public profile, or some other instrumental reason.

The disadvantage, as "me" notes, is that jerks could try to use your weakest work against you, and the more you share the more ammunition you give them.

Similar considerations apply for and against philosophical blogging. I think it's *impartially* good to share your philosophical ideas (that's why we're in the business, right?). Whether it's more likely to help or harm your career is harder to tell. If philosophers were generally reasonable and wise then it would be looked upon positively. But there are reasons to doubt the antecedent.

For more on why I think philosophers ideally ought to blog, see:
https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/philosophers-should-blog

[Hermias]

“Kill them all; let God sort them out“

Analogously, publish it all, let (providence?, sheer accident?, merit??) sort it out.

It seems right that if you are “auto-publishing” then people will assume that it’s not so great (and they might be right). But, there’s no point being in this game for ego. You don’t know what will stick. Some people seem to think that “high batting average”/ top performances only is the goal. If what you say is true - that it’s been reviewed by your colleagues, then just keep resubmitting to worse and worse journals. That’s kind of similar to self-publishing, but at least it will carry cache for non-Leiterific folx.

[rutabagas]

A compromise strategy that's worked for me has been to post short descriptions of my works in progress, shorter than and not identical to the abstracts I submit to journals, and to delete paper titles when they're under review.