5. Can I/my student take down the preprint and submit to a journal, because this is not a publication yet, right? You can submit your preprint to a journal. Most journals have policies that do not conflict with prior posting of the work as a preprint on a server. Wikipedia and a tool called SHERPA/RoMEO will help you navigate this space. It’s worth noting that, even though preprints are not yet peer-reviewed in a journal-organized manner, they are in fact publications, in the sense that each version is a permanent record of your work that cannot be removed. In order for preprints to act as stable elements in the scholarly record, there needs to be an expectation that they will be persistent. For this reason, they receive a DOI that makes each version individually citable and time stamped as being released publicly on a particular date. You can post other preprint versions – after you have incorporated feedback from your peers for instance – and this version will have a new DOI. Most preprint servers will display the latest version of the manuscript but will link to previous versions. For example, Figure 3 shows a screenshot from the bioRxiv website with the latest version of a preprint posted on December 1, 2017 (doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/171314).