Hi Drs. Babu, Fox, and Stoddard,
Thank you for the invitation to review. I have great respect for the quality of papers published in the journal, and I have published my own papers there in the past. However, I must decline this review request due to your journal's policy against citing preprints.
As of July 1st, 2018, your journal's instructions to authors stipulate that 'Preprints, personal communications, unpublished results, manuscripts submitted or in preparation, statistical packages, computer programs and web sites should be cited in the text only, NOT included in the Reference list'. By contrast, books (peer reviewed or not) and gene/assembly accessions (as above) have instructions provided for their in-reference citation format. This appears to be unique among journals, and it hampers the practice of scientific communication. Citation is a way of identifying the origin of an idea or method, and as often as not, verifying that it fulfills its role as cited. If a source cannot be identified, then it is as if the work never existed, and all findings layered upon that foundation must therefore be considered suspect. In this way, any break in the chain diminishes the value of any work published in your journal.
In any case, thank you for the invitation. Because this policy harms the practice of science, I will not submit any of our lab's work to you, and will continue to decline review requests from your journal until this policy has been suitably revised. This is doubly unfortunate, as the NAR webserver issue has generally been one that I have viewed favorably.
Sincerely, Casey