The Winnower | The selfish scientist’s guide to preprint posting

"Preprint posting is the right thing to do for science and society. It enables us to share our results earlier, speeding up the pace of science. It also enables us to catch errors earlier, minimising the risk of alerting the world to our findings (through a high-impact publication) before the science is solid. Importantly, preprints ensure long-term open access to our results for scientists and for the public. Preprints can be rapidly posted for free on arXiv and bioRxiv, enabling instant open access ... Journals administer peer review and provide pretty layouts and in some cases editing services. Preprints complement journals, enabling us to read about each other's work as soon as it's written up and without paywall restrictions. With the current revival of interest in preprints (check outASAPbio), more and more scientists choose to post their papers as preprints. All major journals including Nature, Science, and most high-impact field-specific journals support the posting of preprints. Preprint posting is in the interest of journals because they, too, would like to avoid publication of papers with errors and false claims. Moreover, the early availability of the results boosts early citations and thus the journal's impact factor. Check out Wikipedia's usefuloverview of journal preprint policies. For detailed information on each journal's precise preprint policy, refer to the excellent ROMEO website at the University of Nottingham's SHERPA project on the future of scholarly communication (thanks to Carsten Allefeld for pointing this out) ..."