People often have questions about preprints, including how to post and manage them and their implications for the publication process. Here, we gather answers to questions people may have about preprints. **Existing FAQ resources** - ["Ten Myths Around Open Scholarly Publishing" Tennant et al., 2019][1] - [OSF Guide preprint FAQ][2] - [PsyArXiv FAQ][3] **Frequently Asked Questions** ------------------------------ **Am I allowed to post a preprint?** If you have an academic job or another position that allows you to retain ownership of the work you create, you own your unpublished work, and can post it as a preprint. If your work is under review, you still own the work, although it is courteous to inform the editor that you intend to or have posted the work as a preprint. If your work is published and you signed a standard publication agreement, you own the submitted draft of the work, and can post that. You may also be able to post the published version, depending on the publisher’s policy, which will be linked on the journal’s website. Policies as of March 2021 are summarized in Table 2. **Where should I post my preprint?** To maximize the reach and citation impact of your work, post it in a stable, public repository that assigns a DOI, is indexed by Google Scholar, allows public commentary, and supports versioning. PsyArXiv, bioRxiv, SocArXiv, and EdArXiv all offer these features. **When should I post my preprint?** If you’d like to get feedback on an unpublished paper, post your preprint before submitting it for publication. If you’d only like to speed dissemination or simply make the work OA, post the work after it has been accepted for publication. **Should I license my preprint?** Skipping a license may seem like a good way to signal that you support normative academic use of your work, but it is not. Legally, having no license defaults to the permissions allowed by copyright (e.g., fair use only in the United States). CC-BY Attribution 4.0 is probably the best fit for most academics because it explicitly permits people to engage in normative academic use: people can redistribute and adapt your work as long as they give you credit. **Do journals desk reject work because it has been posted as a preprint?** Major publishers in psychology explicitly permit authors to post preprints prior to submission, and therefore should not reject work because it has been posted as a preprint. **What would happen if I posted a preprint that violates publisher policy or my publication agreement?** If you submitted a journal-formatted published article to a dedicated preprint repository, the repository would probably reject your submission. If you were able to post a publisher-formatted version of your paper online, the publishers may eventually notice and send you a formal request to remove the article. Format-related copyright violations are obvious but content-related violations like posting the author-formatted version of record are far harder to detect by both repositories and publishers. **Do papers posted as preprints get scooped?** There is not evidence that posting papers as preprints results in scooping (Tennanet et al., 2019; Bourne et al., 2017; Sarabipour et al. 2019). If work posted as a preprint was later plagiarized or otherwise copied, proving the plagiarism would be straightforward. Unlike with talks and other ways that people share work prior to publication (e.g., conference talks), a preprint itself serves as a conclusive, dated record that establishes its precedence. There are more ambiguous forms of scooping that authors may fear when posting a work as a preprint. It is possible that in posting a preprint, authors may inspire another group to publish a related, improved, or more elaborated work faster, thus nullifying the original work. This version of scooping is quite hard to distinguish from both multiple discovery, where independent scholars have the same insight at the same time, and the ordinary course of scientific progress, where groups build on others’ work using different materials or methods. Disseminating work in any way enables others to build on or otherwise be inspired by it. This is the purpose of dissemination, and it is core to the scientific process, but publication systems that select works based on novelty incentivize mutual secrecy and competition among people with similar research interests. Posting preprints can help indirectly prevent this kind of scooping by helping shift the publication system to be better aligned with core scientific mechanisms and values. **Will posting my preprint affect the peer-review process?** Posting a preprint can affect the peer-review process. For example, preprints sometimes attract press that may complicate the editorial process and preprints might inadvertently identify you to peer-reviewers in a masked review. Ultimately, the effects of preprints on the peer-review process are the editor’s and publisher’s to contend with. You can do your part by disclosing whether your work is or will soon be posted as a preprint to the editor during the submission process, and by avoiding making changes in response to public feedback while it is under review. **Will updating a preprint create too many versions of it and create confusion about which version people should use and reference?** Uploading multiple versions of a preprint can create confusion about which version is most current, particularly when versions have different titles and authors. You can prevent version confusion by following our recommendations to use a repository that supports versioning, include clear information about each version on its title page, and to avoid creating new versions for minor updates. [1]: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/scholcom/98/es. [2]: https://help.osf.io/hc/en-us/articles/360019930493-Preprint-FAQs [3]: http://blog.psyarxiv.com/2016/09/19/psyarxiv-faq/#comment-20516