Preprint servers provide a place for you to leave a publication-quality copy of your manuscript in advance of actually publishing it. In physics, arXiv has been standard for over a decade. In biology and medicine, bioRxiv and medRxiv are now widely used. As far as I can tell, the humanities and social sciences haven't even embraced open-access publishing nearly to the extent of the physical sciences, let alone preprint servers. The social sciences used to have SSRN, but then Elsevier bought it and apparently SocArXiv was created to replace it for those who want less commercial oversight (but apparently also without oversight of anyone who recommends web page color schemes that are accessible to people with various forms of color-deficient vision). There are a lot of preprint servers.

Anyway, Wikipedia is a fine resource, as usual.