I, and I’m sure other people, have worried about being scooped and beaten to publication due our arXived papers. But really this is silly as we’ve usually given talks, posters, etc on them at big conferences, so the idea that people somehow don’t know about our work before it appears in print is ridiculous. It is far better to get work out, once you consider it worthy of publication, so it can be read and cited by others.
This is in reference to the paper The Geography of Recent Genetic Ancestry across Europe. Go and read the materials and methods. I’m sure that a substantial minority of the readers of this weblog have used every single piece of software listed therein. Phasing and such requires a little bit of computational muscle, but that’s not an impossible hurdle. Additionally, many readers with academic affiliations could get their hands on the POPRES data set. But the generation of a paper, from methods to results to discussion, is not simply a robotic sequence of running data through software or algorithms. You need a first-rate statistical geneticist (e.g., the authors) to actually assemble the pieces together together coherently …