I Love Preprints - Scientific American Blog Network

"I’m in graduate school to learn, and preprints—draft versions of journal articles that are shared prior to peer review—offer a great opportunity to do just that. Here’s how preprints help young researchers grow in ways traditional types of scientific communication don’t.

THEY SAVE TIME

The first few months of a graduate program are typically spent scouring the available literature with the intention of planning out the next few years of your life. That’s when you learn the methods and practices that will shape the rest of your research trajectory. If someone somewhere has designed a fantastic new method you could use, you can only hope it’s already made it through peer review. Otherwise, you’re unlikely to learn about it in time—unless it’s been published as a preprint. The thing is, researchers in biomedical science wait an average of eight months after submitting their article to a journal for it to be published. Eight months is a very long time for a graduate student who wants to eventually, you know, graduate...."