"Everyone Else Does It": The Rise of Preprinting Culture in Computing Disciplines

TL;DR

The paper investigates how preprinting is shaping publication culture in fast-moving computing fields like AI and HCI. It uses semistructured interviews with 15 academics to explore motivations, practices, and perceptions, revealing diverse, evolving preprinting behaviors influenced by visibility, career incentives, and fears of scooping. The findings highlight benefits such as rapid dissemination and priority protection, alongside drawbacks including lack of formal recognition, quality concerns, and potential anonymity issues, and discuss tensions with traditional peer review. The authors argue for a more open, timely, and equitable publication ecosystem and propose design directions, including AI-assisted review and alternative dissemination mechanisms, to better align scholarly communication with the needs of dynamic computing communities.

Abstract

Preprinting has become a norm in fast-paced computing fields such as artificial intelligence (AI) and human-computer interaction (HCI). In this paper, we conducted semistructured interviews with 15 academics in these fields to reveal their motivations and perceptions of preprinting. The results found a close relationship between preprinting and characteristics of the fields, including the huge number of papers, competitiveness in career advancement, prevalence of scooping, and imperfect peer review system - preprinting comes to the rescue in one way or another for the participants. Based on the results, we reflect on the role of preprinting in subverting the traditional publication mode and outline possibilities of a better publication ecosystem. Our study contributes by inspecting the community aspects of preprinting practices through talking to academics.