Publishing Research in Motion: Why My Work Remains Accessible, Traceable, and Open to Revision

I make my research public before it is potentially published by a journal, I make the full texts openly accessible, and I preserve successive versions as the work develops.

This practice is no longer simply what I initially called “Write in Public,” as though the purpose were mainly to show writing while it is still taking shape. Over time, it has become a much more structured practice and, more importantly, one that is directly connected to how I understand research itself.

I do not assume that a paper suddenly appears in its definitive form, nor that it necessarily stops changing once it becomes public. Research develops, encounters new evidence, absorbs objections, exposes its own weaknesses, and may be transformed by work carried out months or even years later.

Rather than erase that history, I prefer to leave it visible.

That is now the main reason I deposit my research openly, assign it a DOI, and preserve the successive versions that document its development on Zenodo.

A paper does not simply appear finished

Academic publishing can easily create an illusion of linearity. We encounter a stabilized article with an introduction, methods, results, discussion, and references, as if the reasoning had naturally unfolded in that order until it reached its final form.

Actual research rarely works that way.

An intuition may precede the evidence needed to support it by several months. A documentary finding may force a reconsideration of an assumption that previously seemed solid, while a formulation that once appeared satisfactory may become inadequate after a new distinction emerges.

An idea may also begin in one paper and reveal its broader significance much later, after it encounters a different research problem.

The final publication necessarily removes much of this trajectory from view. That is not a flaw in itself: a published article obviously does not need to reproduce every hesitation that preceded its current form.

But there is no reason the history itself must disappear.

Public versioning allows me to preserve it. A first version is not simply an inferior version of the fourth one; it is an identifiable state of the work at a particular point in time. It shows what was already present, what had not yet emerged, and how particular ideas, distinctions, and demonstrations were gradually constructed.

Making the research genuinely accessible

Making research public means more than announcing that it exists, publishing its title, or assigning it a bibliographic reference.

I want the texts themselves to remain accessible.

They can be opened, read, downloaded, examined, and challenged without depending on an institutional subscription, privileged database access, or an editorial decision about whether the material should sit behind a paywall.

Accessibility is not peripheral to this practice. It is part of the practice itself.

If research is supposed to be open to discussion, I believe it should actually be available for examination. A reader should be able to return to the source, check a claim, inspect the references, see exactly what evidence supports an argument, and compare successive states of the same work.

That possibility also extends beyond the most recent version.

When a paper changes, its earlier states remain available, making it possible to examine not only what I argue today but also how that position came into being.

I am therefore not merely making my conclusions public.

I am making their history accessible.

Research continues after the first deposit

Making a paper public does not, in my view, make it untouchable.

That would confuse publishing one state of the research with completing the thinking that produced it.

When new evidence appears, when a weakness becomes visible, or when work conducted elsewhere changes my understanding of a problem, I can return to the relevant text and expand it, sharpen a distinction, correct an argument, or sometimes reconstruct a much larger section.

A new version then becomes public while the earlier one remains accessible.

I am not silently replacing one paper with another: I am documenting its movement.

This matters all the more because my research no longer functions as a sequence of entirely independent publications. It is gradually becoming a body of work in which different objects intersect, respond to one another, and sometimes transform one another.

Research on burnout may reveal a problem concerning measurement. Work on measurement may then alter the analysis of other forms of suffering. Research on identity formation may clarify mechanisms first observed in educational or career guidance, while a historical document discovered in another project may force me to revisit an earlier theoretical formulation.

The papers therefore do not live in separate boxes.

They sometimes correct one another, but more often they amplify one another.

A living body of research rather than a collection of frozen papers

This is probably the clearest description of how I now work: I am not simply producing successive articles, but gradually constructing a body of research whose individual parts must be able to evolve with the whole.

Each text obviously has its own object, sources, and argument. But I see no reason to preserve an older formulation artificially when later work makes it possible to clarify, strengthen, or surpass it.

When a mechanism becomes clearer elsewhere, it can return to enrich an earlier paper. When a new distinction becomes necessary, it can be incorporated wherever it genuinely improves the analysis. And when new documentary evidence changes my understanding of a problem, the fact that an earlier version has already been deposited is not, in my view, sufficient reason to preserve a formulation that has become less accurate.

What I want to preserve, therefore, is not the immobility of the text.

It is the trace of its transformations.

That distinction matters because it prevents the retrospective rewriting of the research process. Earlier states remain available while later ones show how the work moved.

Publishing before being published

This approach gradually led me to adopt a simple rule: I no longer submit scientific work to a journal before first making it publicly accessible as a preprint with a DOI.

This obviously does not mean that an open-science deposit is equivalent to peer review. The two processes have different purposes and different meanings.

A preprint establishes something much more basic: this work publicly exists, on this date, in this form.

It can be read, cited, downloaded, criticized, and compared with later developments. Its intellectual existence no longer depends on the future decision of an editorial committee.

A journal may subsequently consider the work relevant or irrelevant, request revisions, reject it, or accept it. A peer-reviewed version may become an important new stage in its history, and editorial criticism can of course improve the text.

But the journal does not retroactively decide when the work began to exist.

I therefore no longer want to place research in a closed space for months while waiting for an institution to decide whether it deserves to become visible.

I prefer evaluation, when it occurs, to become part of the public history of the work rather than a condition for its public existence.

The DOI as a marker, not an endpoint

A DOI obviously serves a practical purpose: it provides a durable way to identify, locate, and cite a piece of research.

In my practice, however, its significance goes further.

Combined with public deposit and versioning, it helps establish a verifiable chronology of the research. At one date, this is what the paper said; several months later, this is what was added, corrected, or moved.

An idea that now appears across several of my papers can therefore be traced back to earlier formulations. Its emergence can be identified, its transformations observed, and it may even become apparent that a position I defend today was not yet my position in an earlier version.

That seems intellectually more interesting to me than presenting every publication as though it had always existed in its current form.

The DOI therefore does not consecrate a text or imply that it is finished.

It identifies a particular state of research whose history may continue.

Accessible, traceable, and open to revision

If I had to summarize the practice today, I would reduce it to three properties: my research should remain accessible, traceable, and open to revision.

Accessible, because the text itself should be available, not merely its title, abstract, or citation.

Traceable, because successive versions should make it possible to identify where an idea originated and follow its transformations.

Open to revision, because making research public should not prevent it from incorporating new evidence, sharper distinctions, or a stronger demonstration.

These three dimensions depend on one another. A text that evolved while systematically erasing its earlier states would become difficult to trace; a perfectly referenced but inaccessible text would not allow its development to be examined; and an accessible paper that could no longer be revised simply because an earlier version had been published would become artificially disconnected from the research continuing around it.

My aim is therefore to preserve all three.

Exposing transformation as well

This way of working has an obvious consequence: it exposes more.

An earlier version may contain a less precise formulation, an argument that was later strengthened, or a hypothesis that was eventually abandoned. Someone may be able to see what I thought before my reasoning changed.

I do not consider that a problem.

Research that is genuinely working on its object has no reason to pretend that it knew from the beginning exactly where it would eventually arrive.

The coherence of a body of thought does not necessarily lie in remaining unchanged. It can also lie in making its transformations intelligible and allowing others to reconstruct why a position changed.

I would therefore rather show that a paper moved than erase the traces of that movement.

From “Write in Public” to the genealogy of thought

That is ultimately what remains of the original idea.

When I first began using the expression “Write in Public,” the point was mainly to make the writing process visible and not wait until a manuscript was perfectly stabilized before showing that the work existed.

The practice now goes further.

What I make public is no longer merely writing in progress.

It is the genealogy of a body of thought.

Where did an idea come from? When did it appear? In what form? What changed it? Which later studies strengthened or displaced it? How did initially separate projects eventually become part of a shared architecture?

Those questions are themselves part of the intellectual history of the work.

I see no reason to erase them.

My papers are therefore not monuments that I deposit one after another and then regard as permanently fixed. They are successive, accessible, and traceable states of research that continues to develop.

If my thinking moves, my texts must be able to move with it, without erasing what they once were.