For years, the standard advice to early-career researchers has been to keep your findings private until they’ve been peer reviewed and published in a reputable journal. But that model, while still important, no longer reflects how science is actually happening.
The reality is, research is moving faster than traditional publishing workflows. Sharing results before they’re published, through preprints, public protocols, or milestone uploads, is now a common and growing part of academic life. And it’s not just for senior scientists or flashy labs. Early-career researchers have the most to gain.
Here are five clear reasons why sharing research early is a smart move, especially for those building a career in science.
Science depends on trust, between researchers, and with the public. But trust doesn’t come from polished final papers alone. It comes from visibility into the process.
When researchers share their work in progress, methods, hypotheses, partial data, it allows others to see how conclusions were reached. That kind of openness can strengthen credibility and invite productive feedback, long before formal peer review begins.
Early sharing also reduces the risk of questionable research practices. With a transparent record of progress, it’s much harder to bury inconvenient results or tweak methods to fit a narrative. Platforms like DeSci Publish make this easy, with timestamped uploads and tracked progress across each stage of a project.
One of the biggest problems in science today is that too much research can’t be reproduced. In many cases, this isn’t due to fraud, it’s because the methods or data just aren’t available, or because small but critical details were never documented.
Sharing research early can help solve this. Uploading protocols, data, or code before publication makes it easier for others to follow the logic, test the approach, and replicate the findings.
Even simple things, like sharing a working version of the analysis script or raw figures, can go a long way in making research more robust. And when science is easier to reproduce, it’s easier to trust.
Publishing is slow. That’s no secret. Between submission, peer review, revisions, and final production, a paper can take a year or more to appear in a journal. And during that time, the findings are invisible to most of the world.
That’s a missed opportunity, for the researcher, and for the field. Preprints and open milestone platforms solve this by getting the research out immediately. Scientists in the same area can read and cite it, journalists can report on it, and policymakers can act on it, all without waiting for formal publication.
This kind of early access matters in fast-moving fields like artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, and climate science. But even in slower-moving disciplines, being visible earlier helps researchers stay relevant and discoverable.
When researchers know their work will be shared before publication, it encourages more deliberate planning and documentation. That public accountability, even informal, has a way of keeping projects on track.
It also creates a more natural feedback loop. Instead of waiting for journal reviewers to raise questions months down the line, early sharing opens the door to comments from peers who are familiar with the field and able to provide useful suggestions.
Regular milestone uploads, whether they’re datasets, revised models, or updated figures, also help researchers stay organized. With structured versioning, it’s easier to return to a project after a break and quickly find the most recent version of any file. DeSci Publish was built with this exact use case in mind.
One of the clearest benefits of sharing research before publication is that it gets cited more. A growing body of evidenceshows that articles first released as preprints receive more citations after formal publication. This is consistent across fields and isn’t just a matter of timing. Early sharing increases visibility, which increases impact.
On a practical level, sharing early helps your work show up in search results - places like Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar, and the tools people actually use to keep up with new research. And for someone just starting out, being findable matters. It’s often how collaborations happen, how you get invited to things, or how someone remembers your name when a grant call goes out.
If you’ve done good work and it’s at a point where others could learn from it or build on it, there’s value in sharing it (even if it’s not fully polished). That doesn’t mean skipping the important steps like peer review or careful editing. It just means recognizing that the formal publication process shouldn’t be the only way research becomes part of the scientific conversation.
Early sharing isn’t perfect, and it won’t fix every problem in academia. But it does help. It helps with visibility, with feedback, with staying organized, and sometimes with impact too.
At the very least, it gets your work out of your hard drive and into the world. And that’s a good place to start.
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