If you know the authors of your specific area of research, arXiv is a nice way to read their new papers when they are (mostly) done but the submission to a journal is not finished yet.
If you know the authors of your specific area of research, arXiv is a nice way to read their new papers when they are (mostly) done but the submission to a journal is not finished yet.
This. In my experience, you have to replace peer review with reputation for preprints. That's highly imperfect, and it tends to lead to dismissing of good but work by less well-known researchers as "not peer reviewed", while well-known researchers (or researchers at well-known institutions) basically get a fast track to citations.
Despite the imperfections, I found arXiv indispensable for my research. In particular, mathematics has a slow peer review cycle (it's hard to read and understand, and many referees require that they fully understand a paper to accept it, which imo is a little flawed, but that's the culture). I had several papers that were under review for more than a year (single journal, only one round of revisions), and arXiv was my only showcase. Both works ended up very highly cited, but publication delays would have been an even bigger problem if arXiv wasn't there.
Out of curiosity, what actual journals (with peer review) do you read to keep up with research developments relevant for tech?
I'm in math, so I can't give you an answer on tech journals unfortunately. And for math, I don't really read any specific journal. It's so much work to read and get something out of a research paper in math that I pretty much only read papers that are directly related to my work or have been recommended to me.
they also keep the papers as a pre-edited, free version of the peer reviewed equivalent
This reminded me of the fact that one colleague of mine even updates the arXiv version if any errors are spotted and says himself that this makes the arXiv version better than the journal version.
fantastic bloke, I wish most people did this