Comment by nycticorax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nycticorax | Hacker News Reader

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It's certainly fear, uncertainty, and doubt, but usually when people use the term "FUD' they mean to imply that the fear, uncertainty, and doubt are unfounded. But in this case, all three are justified. The article mentions that Nature and Science are open to papers that have been pre-published. But I believe that many biology journals still have a blanket policy of not considering papers that have been pre-published. If that's the case, the working scientist is highly motivated to not pre-publish, since it shuts the door to later (peer-reviewed) publication. Unless, of course, the scientist is 100% sure they can get it published in Science or Nature. And in practice one is almost never sure of this.

I'm always curious to know how physics, as a field, got over this and related humps. Was it just easier to get everyone on board because it's a smaller community? Were the journals not as savvy to the fact that pre-prints are not really in their interest?

The journals don't really care about preprints. Most of their revenue comes from university subscriptions, and so long as they can claim that their paywalled versions of the papers are the final and official ones and the preprints are merely unedited drafts, there is no threat to that revenue stream. (Placating the journals is part of the reason why they're called preprints rather than just papers. On Arxiv, authors will often update their preprint even after the paper is accepted in a journal.)

How do you know this? One reason they're called "preprints" is that they haven't (necessarily) been peer-reviewed...

Almost all the publishers I would consider publishing in now allow pre-prints. A partial list: Nature journals (not just Nature), AAAS (not just Science), PNAS, Springer, Cambridge University Press, Cold Spring Harbor Press, many Oxford University Press journals. Cell Press does not forbid it although they reserve right to make a case-by-case decision.

That's great (seriously), but doesn't that undermine the premise of the original article? I just checked, and American Physiological Society journals still expressly forbid prepublication. So it's still not universal...

I was just responding to your comment, and didn't claim it was universal. But it's many journals, not just a couple. For me, it's almost all journals I would have considered publishing in anyway.

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