Our group always pre-publish to arXiv, as a way of saying "we did this first/already" because we usually suspect, and half the times are correct, that our competitor are on a similar research. But as soon as we arXiv, we start the hunt to publish with as high Impact Factor as we can. Why? Almost 100% grants applications are going to evaluate you for the weight of your publications, and some of them doesn't even consider indexed publications below Quartile 1 or 2. The IF of the journal is a direct proxy for your work quality.

In our experience, arXiv doesn't peer review at all. You get some twitter posts, messages of congratulations, at most a couple of questions. But nothing like the average peer seriously reviewing your paper.

I wouldn't pay a dime to publish if my salary wasn't affected (e.g. being Linus). I would submit to arXiv, Github, Twitter or even a "Tell HN", and probably reach a larger audience. In fact, the journals ask you to promote your papers on your social networks, because they know theirs doesn't matter unless you are Science or Nature. But sadly that's not how the scientific world works.

You're totally right. In fact that's one of the main reasons I gave up on an academic career. My collaborators who still rely on grants are miserable, and with good reason.

The whole grant driven, non-profit world is really an odd place. It's hard to explain to people who haven't experienced it first hand.

Dramatically increasing the amount of scientific research grant funding nationwide would be a natural response to this part of the demographic transition and to the idea of promoting college education, but instead we have an academic pyramid scheme that drives huge amounts of raw researcher labor off a cliff and into Starbucks.

In some fields having it be pre-published pretty much disqualifies that work to be ever published in a way that "counts" as almost all high impact factor journals will only consider unpublished research, so placing it in arXiv means that this research will never be considered 'quality' by the formal criteria and the work is wasted from the perspective of fulfilling the obligations towards the funding source which required Q1 publications.

I agree that being the first is important. I have had a paper reviewed, then rejected, only to see the same idea elsewhere a while after. I cannot say the reviewer "had the same idea" nor prove, but it is known to happen. Putting into arXiv remediates that. However, my personal issue with that is that the journal might not be that keen to want to publish your paper after knowing it was publicly available elsewhere, as they thrive "innovation" and "being the first" as well. It's a very difficult problem, indeed.

What we did in the past was contact the editor first and ask if they have any problem with it being pre-published. Some do (most of them in our experience), some don't. The paper always change between arXiv and the journal, so the source of truth is the journal.

> I have had a paper reviewed, then rejected, only to see the same idea elsewhere a while after

I've seen worse. A grant being rejected by the grant reviewer, only to be re-submitted slightly changed by a reviewer's friend (this is a small world, we know each other) the next year. The inners of science suck, most of us keep doing it because we are like monks: we love God (Science), but we hate the Church.

The problem is that the rest of the world does not really like reviewing stuff. A few people hint frauds, which is a great service, but that’s about it.