In addition to some dinosaur bone pictures, this post is an argument against posting preprints because a) the author doesn't want to deal with feedback from people who aren't official peer reviewers, and b) doesn't want to bother reading anyone else's preprints.
That's fine for the author. Nobody should force you!
But being in a field with extremely slow peer review processes, preprints are a lifeline. (I still believe in the importance and value of long, careful peer review, which I think is a good counterpoint to quicker pp publishing.) Often I get the best feedback from non-scholars who read the preprints. And ideas circulating in preprints start to forge new collaborations and relationships long before the journal publication happens.
Shout out in particular to OSF.io which lets me post non-crawlable private links to papers pre-publication (so they don't show on Google Scholar, etc) and then easily port those to a public preprint when the time is right.
That's fine for the author. Nobody should force you!
But being in a field with extremely slow peer review processes, preprints are a lifeline. (I still believe in the importance and value of long, careful peer review, which I think is a good counterpoint to quicker pp publishing.) Often I get the best feedback from non-scholars who read the preprints. And ideas circulating in preprints start to forge new collaborations and relationships long before the journal publication happens.
Shout out in particular to OSF.io which lets me post non-crawlable private links to papers pre-publication (so they don't show on Google Scholar, etc) and then easily port those to a public preprint when the time is right.