Today I dug out a handful (37) posts from the past two years that were published as #delayed-release content (and have all been tagged as such to indicate they were not public at their publication date). Many of these were connected to the #warning-signals project but involved results that I or Alan weren’t ready to provide ahead of publication, as I discussed in a post when I first began marking some posts for delayed release, challenges with collaboration in open science These posts were created while on the Wordpress platform and had been marked private, so that they would be invisible to public browsing. Wordpress makes this easy to do, as I discuss in the earlier post. When I switched to a Jekyll platform, these posts all received the yaml header published: false and were also excluded from the Github repository until I could revisit and decide which to release. Managing these posts for release in the Jekyll framework just requires a little command-line fu, grep -l 'published: false' *.md grabs the relevant posts for inspection and release.
The notebook is currently back to an ONS All-content, immediate, as I have been able to okay the practice with all current major collaborations. (Sure, there’s always stuff that doesn’t make it into the notebook or is not appropriate for the notebook – the most common case of the latter being peer reviews I write for various journals. Though I make a practice of signing my reviews, I believe they still represent private communication unless the authors, editors and journals were to agree to publishing them.) All of these posts would have been released sooner but for finding a minute to remember to do so – perhaps a cautionary example for the delayed release practice.
Looking back on these posts, I probably would not have delayed most of them today, as I have gotten more comfortable not only with the open notebook, but with discussing the practice with collaborators. My own feelings of not wanting to push my adviser in a discussion of the notebook was as much responsible for these delays as other factors that I discuss in the earlier post. One key thing I wondered about in writing delayed-release posts was whether I would (perhaps subconsciously) write in a different or more candid style than I do for my regular notes. I was glad not to notice any glaring examples (though perhaps a diligent or very bored reader might find some!) of expletives and insulting commentary in the delayed posts. I do notice the overall tone and volume of the textual content changes slightly. However, that trend is actually much more dominant in comparing my very early posts (mostly from the OWW days), which were quite discursive, to the current posts which tend to be much more terse.
So have a look at the #delayed-release posts and let me know what you think!