While browsing my twitter feed this morning, I came across a tweet from ScienceOpen about a new article “In praise of preprints” by Norman Fry, Helina Marhsall, and Tasha Mellins-Cohen (published open access in Microbial Genomics; doi: 10.1099/mgen.0.000259). This article re-asserts familiar advantages (credit, visibility, pre-submission and prepublication review) and disadvantages (no peer review, novelty not required, financially unsustainable, and obscuring priority), and ends with a reinforced commitment to preprints (and smoothed workflow via bioRxiv) and a position statement in support of preprints from the Microbiology Society.
At ±5am EDT, there was already one response to this, from Lonni Besançon, who wrote:
#preprints can only be helpful in the dissemination of research results. I wonder whether someone has looked at whether they could actually be enough.#peerreview could happen directly on preprint platforms and could be done massively and in a totally open fashion @openreviewnet
which prompted me to wonder (and reply) whether any of the preprints I’ve posted have received any comments…
The answer: No. Not a one. In five years of posting preprints.
And, as today is a holiday here in the US, I had plenty of time to burrow further down this rabbit-hole…
The Unbalanced Ecologist 