9. What if I put my protocol on the preprint and then someone else scoops me? Journals are not protecting us from this kind of abuse. Even if there is 1% chance of this happening, I still would not risk it. As we attempted to address earlier, the fear of scooping is a big one. It is true that most journals will not explicitly say in their policy that they accept preprints as a way to establish priority on the scientific discovery. However, in a sense, posting a preprint is much safer than presenting your unpublished work as a poster (which you can also post on certain websites, cite them and assign DOIs to them, e.g., Figshare), given that they allow you to quickly gain credit for your work on a timestamped basis. To this point, we have also heard of examples where people got scooped for not posting their work as a preprint by someone else who had done it. Perhaps, this is more about changing the culture within the scientific community than changing journal policies. If a researcher is prone to scooping other researchers and that’s how they advance in their career, that fact will be known within the community. It will then be up to the community to stop rewarding such individuals.