New NIH Policy on Interim Research Products
On March 24, the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced policy  NOT-OD-17-050, which "encourages investigators to use interim research products, such as preprints, to speed the dissemination and enhance the rigor of their work." Preprints can be cited in an NIH application anywhere other research products are cited, such as in a biographical sketch or in progress reports. Previously, such research products could not be cited in these sections. There are some restrictions on where the interim research product can be hosted: the publisher must issue a Digital Object Identifier and have misconduct policies in place.
Note that scholarly preprint servers such as bioRxiv  comply with NIH's requirements for hosting of interim research products that can be cited in NIH grants.


Journal of Neurophysiology Embraces the NIH Policy
Many journals don't allow prepublication of research contained in articles they publish, and thus will not accept papers previously hosted on a preprint server.

Journal of Neurophysiology is an exception: we embrace prepublication of research on scholarly preprint servers such as bioRxiv, arXiv, or PeerJ.
We have taken the additional step of establishing a mechanism to directly submit articles to Journal of Neurophysiology from BioRxiv, eliminating the need to duplicate the entry of metadata.

Use of a preprint server allows authors to receive comments from the scientific community, allowing the article to be improved prior to submission to a peer-reviewed journal. This leads to enhanced rigor and reproducibility of research.

Our experience is that articles previously hosted on a preprint server have a more favorable outcome in peer review than those that weren't. Thus, we strongly encourage the judicious use of a preprint server to improve papers prior to peer review.


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Journal of 
Neurophysiology  
(a multidisciplinary neuroscience journal)