Nora Turoman from our team taught a guest-lecture entitled “Preprints and peer-review: a deep dive”, as part of the Bachelors in Psychology course “Compétences et connaissances scientifiques en psychologie” at the University of Geneva.
Inspired by Tobias Wingen’s preprint (https://osf.io/7n3mj) showing that a short paragraph explaining preprints and peer-review can change how laypeople perceive the trustworthiness of scientific findings, Nora started the lecture with a practical session that, like the Wingen preprint, asked students to rate the trustworthiness of excerpts from a handful of scientific papers. The numbers were too low to produce meaningful results, but the students found it to be an engaging way to start the discussion on preprints. The rest of the lecture focused on demystifying the peer-review process, the advantages and disadvantages of preprints, and how to submit a preprint of your own.
After positive feedback, Nora will likely return for another guest-lecture in 2022 - hopefully this time with the PRECHECK checklist!