Preprint servers. Why?

Recent preprints from researchers
in the BiGCaT group.

Henry Rzepa asked us the following recently: ChemRxiv. Why? I strongly recommend reading his pondering. I agree with a number of them, particularly the point about the following. To follow the narrative of the joke: "how many article versions does it take for knowledge to disseminate?", the answer sometimes seems to be: "at least three, to make enough money of the system".

Now, I tend to believe preprints are a good thing (see also my interview in Preprintservers, doen of niet?, C2W, 2016. PDF): release soon, release often has served open science well. In that sense, a preprint can be like that: an form of open notebook science.

However, just as we suffer from data dumps for open source software, we see exactly the same with (open access) publishing now. Is the paper ready to be submitted for peer review, oh, let's quickly put it on a preprint server. A very much agree with Henry that the last thing we are waiting for is a third version of a published article. This is what worries me a great deal in the "green Open Access" discussion.

But it can be different. For example, people in our BiGCaT group actually are building up a routine of posting papers just before conferences. Then the oral presentation gives a laymens outline of the work, and if people want to really understand what the work is about, they can read the full paper. Of course, with the note that a manuscript may actually not be sufficient for that, so the preprint should support open science.

But importantly, a preprint is not a replacement for an proper CC-BY-licensed version of record (VoR). If the consensus that that is what preprints are about, then I'm no longer a fan.