  A public preprint server such as arXiv allows authors to publish their
manuscripts before submitting them to journals for peer review. It offers the
chance to establish priority by making the results available upon completion.
This article presents the arXiv section Quantitative Biology and investigates
the advantages of preprint publications in terms of reception, which can be
measured by means of citations. This paper focuses on the publication and
citation delay, citation counts and the authors publishing their e-prints on
arXiv. Moreover, the paper discusses the benefit for scientists as well as
publishers. The results that are based on 12 selected journals show that
submitting preprints to arXiv has become more common in the past few years, but
the number of papers submitted to Quantitative Biology is still small and
represents only a fraction of the total research output in biology. An immense
advantage of arXiv is to overcome the long publication delay resulting from
peer review. Although preprints are visible prior to the officially published
articles, a significant citation advantage was only found for the Journal of
Theoretical Biology.
