Can I still publish a paper on peer reviewed journals several years after publishing it on ArXiv?

Question

I have done some discoveries concerning signal processing from about 6 years which I think are quiet important advances but I never have time to finish the works. As example I know that the main application are new on my field but I am not sure the theory does not exists on other fields. The links with other theories are not fully established yet, so I do not know exactly what is new and what is not. I do not want for now to be judged by peer reviewers which risk to only examine what is bad on the paper but I found it a pitty to not share those discoveries so I am thinking by submitting as preprint, and after some years and maybe some advices/correction from some readers, submitting it on a peer reviewed journal.

If I do that, and someone publish the same ideas after (particularly if they do not cite me, because they do imagine those ideas come from them or are obvious), will I still be able to publish it since reviewers can oppose me that those ideas are not new anymore ? Journals could not see the interrest of publishing works which are already known by the community on the only aim to help me to claim my anteriority.

So to sum up, if a reviewer reject a paper because the ideas already exist from other works but those works are posterior to the preprint, can I ask to editor to not take this opposition into account?

Is there examples of important papers published years after their preprints? In that case should it be adapted to explain what others have done of your works ?

Answer 1

You speak of ideas, yet ideas are worth close to nothing without results, at least in the academic understanding. Sure, they are the beginning, but are not intellectually protected by themselves. Anyone can have an idea, but it takes work to develop that idea into a solid contribution to science.

So, if you have real "discoveries" and "important advances", you shouldn't be afraid to submit them for peer-review, as that is the only way to scientifically validate your work. Otherwise, it doesn't matter if someone develops on your idea and doesn't cite you. Similarly, it doesn't matter where you put those ideas, it could be arxiv, your personal website, facebook, etc.

As stated in the comments, you can submit a preprint and also submit to a journal, the preprint puts a timestamp onto your work so you have time to publish it (even if it gets rejected and you retry). However, this holds only for work that has the chance to get accepted for publication, i.e. has some real contribution.

Answer 2

You always want to put your best work out into the open. If your work is right now not of sufficient quality (as can only be judged by yourself) to be read and evaluated by peer reviewers, then one could argue it is also not ready to be a pre-print (where essentially all readers are your peer reviewers).

There isn't something magically different about peer reviews for a paper other than to make sure the paper doesn't claim what it shouldn't or can't and to make sure that the science is solid. Yes, this can lead to a prolonged back and forth between the author and the journal/reviewers, but from an author's perspective you always want to post/submit your best possible work with clarity of ideas, concepts and immaculate presentation of the data. Nobody wants the literature (pre-prints or peer-reviewed papers) to be littered with stuff that's not yet 'finished'. And as a scientist, you shouldn't want to let your good ideas go out into the world in a bad wrapping!

The fact that you struggle to find time to finish your work will be recognizable by many, but there are two options: you need to practice patience until you have time to polish OR prioritize finalizing it.