Policy: Do not accept preprints or unclear policies.
Aim: Discourage other citations of record, maintain value proposition of journal publishing, ensure content is peer reviewed before dissemination.
Outcome: Unnecessary delays in communication amongst researchers.
"In my experience, this lag time [between submission and publication] is on average about six months, with a non-trivial long tail of papers that take much longer. To put this in context with some back-of-the-envelope calculations, lets define a unit of time called a Scientific Career (SC), and let 1 SC equal 30 years. If there are 50,000 papers published in biology per year (this number is somewhat random, but probably within an order of magnitude given that about 500k papers are added to PubMed per year), and on average each paper takes 6 months to go through the review process, then each year ~800 Scientific Careers are spent bringing papers from initial submission to formal publication. It would be a laughable to argue that 800 SCs of research or value have been added to the papers during this process (lets be honestfor most of that time the papers are just sitting on someones desk waiting to be read). The system of pre-publication peer review thus dramatically retards scientific progress." - Joe Pickrell
“Scientists often fear the so-called Ingelfinger Rule more than they have to, but it has a real chilling effect on the flow of scientific information,” - Ivan Oransky, the cofounder of Retraction Watch
Our approach: You can write securely in private or in the open--your choice. Many use Authorea as a place to create their manuscripts and then leave them up as preprints. See some
here.