This guest post is by Chuck Langley on the policy of Genetics on preprint servers.
The journal GENETICS promulgates a formal new policy on prepublication.
Population genetics continues to be a prized element of the editorial purview of GENETICS. Creating value for and servicing this critical constituency is a high and ongoing goal of the editorial board and staff. The increasing use of preprint archives by our community and the perceived value of early, unfettered communication to the advancement of research prompted the GENETICS editors to adopt a policy that enables authors to submit drafts of manuscripts to preprint archives (such as arXiv) before or during the period that the manuscript is under review at GENETICS. In line with the journal’s role in scientific publishing, GENETICS asks two things of the authors: 1) the accepted version of a manuscript should not be submitted to an archive; GENETICS has an efficient “early access” mechanism via its website that makes the manuscript freely accessible within 2 weeks of its acceptance; 2) upon final publication in GENETICS, authors should insert a journal reference (including DOI), and link to the published article on the GENETICS website, and include the acknowledgment: “The published article is available at www.genetics.org.” For help with these simple updates to arXiv.org submissions, see here for details. Questions and comments on this and other journal policies can be directed to the Editor in Chief (Mark Johnston), the Executive Editor (Tracey DePellegrin Connelly) or any other member of the Editorial Board. Please submit your best work for publication in GENETICS, the peer-edited journal of the Genetics Society of America.
C.H. Langley
Haldane's Sieve 
It is great to see this change. GENETICS has long been the premiere place for popgen theory and methods to appear. I see the combination of the arXiv and GENETICS has highly complementary for population genetics. Many of my articles that have appeared in GENETICS have benefited extensively from the quality of the reviews. I see the journal as offering an added value to the articles that appear there, a key attribute of particular journals in this age where “publishing” is undergoing a revolution.
This is awesome! I’m really happy to hear about this. It’s great to have an explicit, clear preprint policy from a journal, especially as someone who is very nervous about offending journals.
Bravo!
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Eminently reasonable. I’m happy to see we evolutionary/population geneticists are finally catching up to physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists in this regard.
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This is a great news. A popular journal like Genetics adopting open publication policy will encourage more researchers to publish in the open preprint servers.
This post mentions only “Genetics”,but does the open policy hold for GSA’s other journal “G3:Genes, Genomes, genetics” as well? If not, can we expect some time soon?
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@nextgenseek I sent your question along to Chuck, and he’s following up on this.
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