> Back in grad school a colleague of mine spent nine months on an experiment in a new field and submitted it as a paper to a quality journal. Six months later, the paper was rejected for lack of novelty: One of the reviewers had found a paper with a figure-by-figure duplication of the same experiment -- published on arXiv a week before the rejection decision. Both the managing editor and the author on the arXiv paper were from Chinese universities.

I have no experience in this area, and I am probably going to ask a dumb question: why not always submit the paper to arXiv before submitting it to a journal to protect against this kind of theft? Wouldn't that clearly and indisputably establish priority?