Comment by colincooke | Hacker News Reader

Comment by colincooke | Hacker News Reader

At least in my field (applied machine learning/optics) and my partner's field (cognitive neuroscience) pre-prints are a massive deal. Not only do they allow you to get your work out earlier, google scholar will typically link your pre-print to the published article eventually so anyone who doesn't have a subscription can get a PDF no problem. This probably nullifies the negative effects of not having access to the publisher's library.

It's to the point now I'd say that all of the grad students and younger PIs insist on posting a pre-print. Pretty great trend especially considering with LaTeX the preprint ends up looking just as good as the published version anyways....

Preprint often looks better. I've had publishers send papers to offshoristan where they redid everything including the graphs to match their layout, introducing tons of errors, typos (yes, really...) and problems that even almost 10 rounds of urgent back-and-forth before the deadline didn't fix entirely.

Same in cryptography, where the research community manages our own preprint archive (http://eprint.iacr.org/). My experience has been that preprint archives are often used to "mark territory" i.e. get credit for an idea quickly so that it can be discussed more openly.

Arxiv was a godsend.

Also https://eprint.iacr.org/, https://www.biorxiv.org/, and https://www.ssrn.com/. Probably others too.

I made a list for linguistics here: https://gkayaalp.com/blog/20200319_lingpreprints.html

Some of them are general social sciences tho.

> Not only do they allow you to get your work out earlier

Why can't you just upload to arxiv and perhaps places like researchgate or academia.edu ?

Uploading to arxiv is a pre-print. That's exactly what the parent is saying that they do. Some journals will forbid this as part of the publishing contract.

That can be circumvented using the standard trick:

https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/119002/7319

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