A very nice article by Amy Harmon in the NY Times.

Handful of Biologists Went Rogue and Published Directly to Internet

On Feb. 29, Carol Greider of Johns Hopkins University became the third Nobel Prize laureate biologist in a month to do something long considered taboo among biomedical researchers: She posted a report of her recent discoveries to a publicly accessible website, bioRxiv, before submitting it to a scholarly journal to review for “official’’ publication.

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And many #ASAPbio supporters retweeted John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist from the University of Wisconsin, who found himself recently at an African university where a paper on African genomes was unavailable because it could not pay the fee for the journal where it was published, and no preprint was available. He expressed his frustration with a profanity. 
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Preprint advocates counter that scientists care too much about their reputations to publish shoddy work, and posts to bioRxiv are clearly marked to indicate that they may contain information that “has not yet been accepted or endorsed in any way by the scientific or medical community.’’ Others note that plenty of peer-reviewed papers in high-profile journals have proved to be wrong, and some argue that carrying out peer review after a paper is published would provide a more rigorous and fair vetting of papers, anyway.