remember, I come from the world of refereed papers :-)

That's the difference between astrophysics and high-energy physics. In the golden age of particle accelerators, preprints were widely circulated among research groups. When the arXiv was set up, the astro-ph section took a while to really take off because <gasp> papers on the archive are not refereed, so how is your average astrophysicist going to know which papers to read?

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman