Case in point: I said to a colleague: “Hey, did you know that Nature is starting up a pre-print repository/ It’s a place where you can put presentations and posters and get a citation for all those normally unciteable things you do at conferences. You can also put manuscripts in progress up there.”

His immediate response was, “Can you still publish it somewhere else?”

I said, “Of course, and it’s an established tradition in other fields of science, like physics.”

I get the impression that he didn’t know much about pre-prints, and I don’t doubt that many other people and publishers are the same way.