One of the main products of academic research is a scientific publication. In an Israeli university, you get all kinds of bonuses, promotions, and other pleasant things according to the quality and quantity of your publications. There are publications that “count” and there are those that do not. A list of journals whose publications do count is managed and updated by the Higher Education Council of Israel, and you have no control over it. Some journals on that list have recently started offering authors the option to publish a preprint of their paper even before it has been officially accepted. When you submit to such a journal, they will offer to publish your preprint and explain how great that would be. This is exactly where the trap snaps shut. If you accept, your paper is immediately published on www.preprints.org — a good site, non-profit, Creative Commons licensed, and so forth. I genuinely like it. However, sometimes a paper never makes it to final publication, for quite numerous reasons. The most recent case involved a colleague whose paper had been approved by all the reviewers and was then suddenly rejected by the editor on the last day before publication. Whether such behavior is normal — it is not, but that is a different story entirely. So my colleague wrote the editor a few words of “respect and appreciation,” then sat down to resubmit the paper elsewhere. And here the trick appeared. The new journal refused the paper because it had been previously published. And the lovely www.preprints.org informed him that “preprints will not be removed to allow journal submission; authors should check in advance whether the journal they intend to submit to accepts preprints.” Months of work, spoiled. No credit, no benefits, no nothing. Be on guard — and don’t say you weren’t warned.
Thoughts about the work and in its vicinity