Recently I did a survey on the different journal policies regarding preprint servers. I am interested in this because I feel it is important to separate the peer review process from the time-stamping (submission) of a scientific communication. Establishing this separation allows for exploration of alternative and parallel ways of determining the value of a scientific communication. This is only possible if journals accept manuscripts previously deposited in pre-print servers.
Today I received the answer from Bioinformatics:
"The Executive Editors have advised that we will allow authors to submit manuscripts to a preprint archive."
If you also think that this model, already very established in physics and maths, is useful you can also sent some mails to your journals of interest to enquire about their policies. If enough authors voice their interest there will be more journals accepting manuscripts from pre-print servers.
I think we are now lacking a biomedical preprint server. The Genome Biology journal served until early this year also as a preprint server but they discontinued this practice. Maybe arxiv could expand to include biomedical manuscripts (they already accept quantitative biology manuscripts) .
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