My god I love coming here and reading the travails of real scientists. The journals that have a "no preprint" policy are primarily Cell Press (link) rags and A

My god I love coming here and reading the travails of real scientists. The journals that have a "no preprint" policy are primarily Cell Press (link) rags and Annals of Oncology. http://crosstalk.cell.com/blog/lets-talk-about-preprint-servers http://crosstalk.cell.com/blog/lets-talk-about-preprint-serv... Note the insane amount of FUD. "We're fine with preprints, as long as we can control them!" But that's kind of the point, isn't it -- wrestling back control from journals with a massive inherent COI! Allowing the public (lay or scientific) to objectively determine what's real and what isn't, with visible salvos from both camps as needed, instead of the invisible and un-accountable hand of an editor or anonymous referees? (I sign my reviews.) Physics doesn't seem to have suffered from preprints -- if anything, it has thrived more than expected thanks to it. I don't hear about a replicability crisis in physics, for some reason. I hear about it all the time in biomedical sciences, perhaps because the review process is so incredibly shady for the "top" journals (in terms of impact factor, a statistically indefensible and criminally manipulated metric). Papers that are outright rejected or in need of major revisions are simply yanked and resubmitted elsewhere (I am guilty of this, by the way; rejected from Nature, so we sent it to NEJM with almost no edits and they accepted it a week later). Senior authors act rationally, so if perfecting a paper will cause a delay and potentially deny them priority on a discovery, who can argue for making the edits instead of resubmitting elsewhere? All of this goes away when preprints are the default. Priority is established by deposition, rather than publication; the discovery often (though perhaps not always) is itself enough to prompt review from rivals, even if only in self-interest; and the preprint status makes it clear that the item has not been formally reviewed. Many or most resulting referee comments are public, often submitted as related deposits. From a scholarship perspective, I cannot for the life of me see the downside, other than reticence to boldly state the truth and face retaliation from shysters. It's a shame that the latter is an issue, but given the even larger amounts of $$$ at stake in physics, it seems that biomedical researchers are mostly just cowards using this as an excuse. (JMHO)