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Well, I’m not a virologist, although I am a geneticist (and am married to a virologist). So, if you’ll excuse the use of technical terms, this is what we in science called a load of complete and total cr*p.I wanted to highlight one particularly nonsensical part of the paper in which the authors refer to a previous paper demonstrating the natural origin of the virus. In their introduction the authors state that:“In addition, authors of this Nature Medicine article show signs of conflict of interests (16,17), raising further concerns on the credibility of this publication.”So here, authors of a “paper” that has not actually been published (in a scientific journal), peer-reviewed or in anyway scientifically validated and is funded by far-right conman Steve Bannon are casting aspersions on the validity of a paper published in one of the most highly respected scientific journals in the world and which has gone through extensive peer-review from independent experts in the field.This sort of statement is far-right lunatic conspiracy theory talk and has absolutely no business being within a hundred miles of a scientific paper and would be sufficient to have it rejected by even the lowliest journal with even the slightest aspirations to scientific credibility.

It pains me to write this since I have some good friends who work in the industry, but closed-access academic publishing needs to die a horrible, fiery death.Let me explain.The vast bulk of basic research that’s done in academia is funded by government grants. Those government grants are funded by taxpayer money.Researchers need to publish their results in peer-reviewed journals, it’s how the information is validated and gets disseminated to the rest of the world, and also the metric by which researchers are evaluated (the number of publications, the quality of the journal, the number of times the publications are cited). Keep in mind, peer reviewers do it for free. In order to publish an article in a peer-reviewed journal, there’s a (sometimes substantial, $8000–10000 per paper, and vary drastically between journals[1][1][1][1]) fee paid to the journal to publish it. Old journals used to talk about defraying publication costs (despite having advertisers), but many newer journals only exist online, so their costs are minimal. These funds come from government grant money, paid for by taxpayers.But here’s the catch - once the article is actually published, taxpayers can’t access it without paying a substantial fee. That’s right. Your tax dollars paid for this research to be done, and paid for it to be published, but unless you have an institutional subscription to the journal (which can cost hundreds of dollars per journal per year[2][2][2][2], and there are many journals) or want to buy the article without having read it first (often for $35–$80 per article) you can’t read it.This is a textbook example of rent-seeking behavior. There are open-access journals now that are free for everyone to access, and a substantial fraction of European funding agencies are now requiring grant recipients to publish in them[3][3][3][3]. Hopefully that is the death knell for research paywalls.Footnotes[1] Open access: The true cost of science publishing[1] Open access: The true cost of science publishing[1] Open access: The true cost of science publishing[1] Open access: The true cost of science publishing[2] https://us.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/2019_sage_journals_institutional_price_list.xlsx[2] https://us.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/2019_sage_journals_institutional_price_list.xlsx[2] https://us.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/2019_sage_journals_institutional_price_list.xlsx[2] https://us.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/2019_sage_journals_institutional_price_list.xlsx[3] Open-Access Plan in Europe Bans Publishing in Paywalled Journals[3] Open-Access Plan in Europe Bans Publishing in Paywalled Journals[3] Open-Access Plan in Europe Bans Publishing in Paywalled Journals[3] Open-Access Plan in Europe Bans Publishing in Paywalled Journals

ProsYour paper gets out faster: people have something concrete to read as your manuscript slogs through the (months or year) long peer review processEstablishing primacy. If you are working on something similar as other researchers, being the first to post on arXiv is an important public marker of who was first (even if the peer review process works out so that the other one gets published first). Also, this diminishes the motivation for unscrupulous referees to 'sit' on your paper while they rush to get their version out.Open access. People who don't have access to paid academic journals, for whatever reason, can read your paper without having to track down your e-mail to request a PDF for themselvesSome hypothetical cons (for the paranoid)Being scooped (if you post papers before they are accepted for publication). If someone is sitting on similar results, they might finish writing it up quickly and submit it to a journal with a faster peer review process than the one you submitted to. Worse yet, the editor and referees might not notice that a similar paper is already on ArXiv. Thus, those people will win where it really counts (peer reviewed paper), and few people will go back in the chronology to figure out which paper was submitted and/or posted on arXiv first.Unsolicited (negative) peer reviews. If people happen to know what journal a paper was submitted to, they might send unsolicited referee reports to the editor. Seeing the actual paper on arXiv, rather than just hearing about it in a talk, will allow them to write a detailed report that the editor might pay attention to. Sounds absolutely crazy, but this has actually happened to people I know.Embargo violations. Fancy journals like Nature and Science have an embargo policy whereby if they publish a paper, this paper must NOT have appeared in any other media source. ArXiv is fine, BUT if the media happens to pick up on the paper (ha!) before it is published, then Nature/Science can rescind. However, the perception that papers submitted to nature/science cannot be posted on arxiv leads many people to hesitate posting a preprint.So in conclusion, there are improbable risks to posting unpublished work on arXiv, but it is almost always better to post a paper while it is hot because peer review and rewriting and re-submission and peer review can take over a year.