1. 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 discovery. However, posting a preprint is no different than presenting your unpublished work as a poster (which you can also post on certain websites, cite them and assign DOIs to them, e.g., Figshare). To an extent, we think this is more about changing the culture within the scientific community than changing the journal policies. If a researcher is so prone to scooping other researchers and that’s how they advance their career, that will be known within the community as a behavior that also happened in other instances (such as after posters at conferences). It will be up to the community to then stop rewarding such individuals. However, preprints do offer a certain amount of credibility in that they allow you to timestamp and get credit for your posted preprint very quickly after posting them. Also, some people choose to submit the same content to a journal right after submitting the preprint. 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.