I’m sure the perceived need for speedy science communication and putting everything online can seem a bit shallow. To paraphrase various comments: ‘How self-important can one be? Do I really think that other people can’t wait to read my latest research paper? Do they need to know that I went to @someperson’s talk and it was #great?’ It may seem like this is all vanity. But it’s not.

The answer to this straw man’s questions are obvious, once I’ve thought about my own relationship to the preprint server Biorxiv, from which I read a lot of papers nowadays: I don’t know whether there is anyone out there waiting for my research papers to be released. (And in fact, I doubt it.) But I know for a fact that I, myself, am waiting for other people’s papers. I’ve found that I really like to read what other people in my field are working on, with as little delay as possible, even with potential errors and unclarities that peer review may help iron out.

As for conference tweets, behind the paper blog posts, and Twitter discussions about talks, preprints, and published papers–if you are part of a tight-knit community of researchers, you probably already know what a lot of the other members are working on, and what their opinions are. You already go to the same meetings, occasionally review each others papers, maybe you’re even on terms where you can just ask each other, maybe even send previews of manuscripts to each other.

But preprints and conference tweets expand that circle to include students, researchers in remote places, those new to the field, those who do not dare to ask. It helps keep us in the loop too. Or draw us a little closer to the loop, at any rate. It may all be vanity, but it has some nice side effects.