6. I know about preprints, but how does ASAPbio get funded? Also, you’re in competition with bioRxiv? ASAPbio (Accelerating Science And Publication in Biology) is a non-profit organization with the goal of promoting the productive use of preprints in the life sciences. The organization is scientist-driven and supported by the Simons, Sloan, Arnold, and Moore Foundations. ASAPbio is not a preprint server, but rather functions as a hub and supports organizations whose efforts aim at increasing the value and use of preprints. Therefore, it is not meant to compete with bioRxiv or any other preprint server.
7. Because this is not a publication yet, it may still be submitted to a journal, right? Yes, you can still submit your preprint to a journal. Most journals have policies that do not conflict with prior posting of the work as a preprint. Wikipedia and a tool called SHERPA/RoMEO will help you navigate this space. As said above, even though preprints are not yet peer-reviewed, they are publications in the sense that each version is a permanent, time-stamped record of your work that cannot be removed. Consequently, each version can be individually cited.  
8. Is there a way to show that you incorporated comments from a preprint when you submit your paper to a journal? To our knowledge, there isn’t a system in place to show that you have incorporated community feedback when submitting your manuscript to a journal. However, you can mention it in the letter to the editor if you think it is important. PREreview, for example, allows reviewers to get a DOI for their preprint reviews. So possibly you could cite the review and say that some of the comments you received from the community were addressed in this submission. Hopefully, as we move towards a system in which community peer review of preprints is a natural node in the publishing workflow, there will be more seamless ways of linking preprint, reviews, and authors’ responses all together as Linked Data.
9. I have a problem with the citation of preprints because they are not peer reviewed. How do you know you are citing work correctly? True, preprints are not peer reviewed in a journal-organized manner. However, PREreview and other efforts have been trying to increase the community feedback on preprints such that peer review happens openly by a larger pool of scientists in order to improve the ‘final’ product. The way to ensure that citation happens ‘correctly’ is by reading the preprint and ensuring the citation is appropriate, just as you would do if citing published, peer-reviewed work. Also, there is no guarantee that an article published in a journal is a) the right one to cite in your context and b) that the results you are citing are correct. Therefore, whether it is peer-reviewed or not, you should check the soundness of the science in the publication and judge for yourself. Finally, citations will include the name of the preprint server to make it obvious that it is a preprint.
10. What if I put my protocol on the preprint and then someone else scoops me? Journals are not protecting us from this kind of abuse. Even if there is 1% chance of this happening, I still would not risk it. As we attempted to address earlier, the fear of scooping is a big one. It is true that most journals will not explicitly say in their policy that they accept preprints as a way to establish priority on the discovery. However, posting a preprint is no different than presenting your unpublished work as a poster (which you can also post on certain websites, cite them and assign DOIs to them, e.g., Figshare). To an extent, we think this is more about changing the culture within the scientific community than changing the journal policies. If a researcher is so prone to scooping other researchers and that’s how they advance their career, that will be known within the community as a behavior that also happened in other instances (such as after posters at conferences). It will be up to the community to then stop rewarding such individuals. However, preprints do offer a certain amount of credibility in that they allow you to timestamp and get credit for your posted preprint very quickly after posting them. To this point, we have also heard of examples where people got scooped for not posting their work as a preprint by someone else who had done it.
11. I’ll post preprints when funding agencies require me to do it. That’s a way to do it. Or you can try posting a preprint and test if you like the outcomes. Most funding agencies already encourage scientists to post their manuscripts as preprints “to speed the dissemination and enhance the rigor of their work”, as written in the NIH policy on preprints. On the ASAPbio website you can read more about current major funding agencies’ policies regarding preprints.
If you have never posted a preprint but will consider doing it as a consequence of this post or other readings, we would love to hear from you about the experience. To share your preprint story or to ask more questions about ASAPbio and preprints in general, please contact ASAPbio Director Jessica Polka at jessica.polka@asapbio.org. To learn more about PREreview please contact the PREreview team at preprintjc@gmail.com (non constructive comments and abusive emails will be ignored).