Can posting a preprint be morally wrong? | Aaron Tay | Musings about librarianship

"Open access is a complicated business. Everytime I think I understand it (and I've blogged a lot on it, trying too get to gripes with it - in particular this post), some new nuance appears to make me realize I don't really understand  at all. In this case, my mind was blown when I learnt that there was  wall of shame for posting preprints on Bioarxiv!   But let's back up a bit and talk a bit about preprints first. Preprints are getting important There are varying definitions of preprint as noted here, But for the purposes of our definition let's just refer to preprints to papers that are the versions before the versions accepted for publication. (aka everything except the accepted version and published version) First off you might be aware that Crossref has encouraged registering of dois for preprints since November 2016. In fact, growth of doi registration for preprints has been 10 times higher than journal articles.  Ross Mounce points out that versioned dois do exist for F1000 as well...."