protect full paper by preprint

Question

through some research that I have conducted shows that: preprint is a version of a scientific article that precedes its acceptance by the editorial board of a scientific journal. It therefore does not include the modifications made by the author(s) at the request of the reading committee during the peer review process, nor the corrections and layout made by the editor. is this an advantage to avoid that my paper is used without my permission by another person, before its peer review?

Answer 1

The peer review process takes a while (think many months or even years). Without pre-prints that research would not be available to the wider research community until after that process was done. Remember, research does not happen in isolation; it is one article reacting to another article, reacting to another article, etc. (It is not really that linear, as each article reacts to multiple other articles and some don't get reactions at all or much later, but you get the idea) Each individual article is usually a tiny step, but together the discipline as a whole makes progress. If for each step we would have to wait a year or so for the peer review process to go through, then that would unacceptably slow down the progress. So the main purpose of pre-prints is to speed up the work of the discipline, not protect your paper.

It may offer partial protection against plagiarism, but it is not uncommon for two or more people to have the same idea at about the same time. So you may still get scooped. Even if you do get to be the first to publish a finding, that does not guarantee you get credited for that, see: Stigler's law of eponymy. So often the bigger danger is getting ignored rather than getting scooped.