It is a kind of funny situation that springer has this published.
Pre-prints are extremely useful in fields where they are widely used. Physics, my original field, uses arxiv as well as self hosted locations. I know biology is trying to do more of this as well. I really don't understand why other fields just start pushing towards this more open model.
> We have shown that, within the boundaries of our corpus, there are no significant differences in aggregate between pre-prints and their corresponding final published versions. In addition, the vast majority of pre-prints (90% - 95%) are published by the open access pre-print service first and later by a commercial publisher. Given the fact of flat or even shrinking library, college, and university budgets, our findings provide empirical indicators that should inform discussions about commercial publishers’ value proposition in scholarly communication and have the potential to influence higher education and academic and research libraries’ economic decisions regarding access to scholarly publications.
(Disclaimer: I have started a project aimed at getting more arxiv-like initiatives in other disciplines off the ground, but am pivoting a bit now as I've noticed that the barrier to running such initiatives is also rather high: https://medium.com/flockademic/announcing-flockademic-academ... )
In the latter, crummy articles are frequently posted for the mere purpose of planting a flag, and you have no basic assurances that they did things to a reasonable standard of quality. In the former, you just lack "publish formatting" which often just means "lowering the DPI on your carfully crafted figures with their crappy automatic article formatter."
A question about arxiv. Can the preprint be updated by the authors? I can imagine wanting to update a preprint after getting input from reviewers.
Second question. Is this research then suggesting that peer-review does little?
Yes, it can, altough it's not consistently done in every discipline, so unless you are familiar with a discipline, you can't rely on the research being most up-to-date.
> Is this research then suggesting that peer-review does little?
I think it's important to make a distinction between the formal peer review process, and the concept of peer review. There's a lot of remarks to be made about the former. In some disciplines, however, it's common to share research on arXiv, collect feedback from readers there, and submit a version to a journal that incorporates that feedback - it's not a stretch to call that peer review as well.
But to somewhat answer the question: practices between disciplines on arXiv vary too much to draw conclusions about the formal peer review process based on this research, in my opinion.