There seems to be two points of view on this with different practices in different disciplines. Some researchers do not make their work public until after it has been accepted for publication in a journal. Until that time, drafts of papers are only circulated to close confidants and usually marked “Do not distribute”. Working papers are published on web sites and in web repositories (such as arXiv or RePEc) as soon as they are finished, at about the same time they are submitted to a …