Reading Marginal Revolution this morning, I ran across this: Integrating blogging and academic publishing.

It points back to this article at Crooked Timber, another econ blog. It discusses arXiv.org, an 'e-Print archive' covering areas of physics. Now, I'm not a physicist and I don't even play one on TV. But from what I can tell, arXiv.org is a pre-press archive of articles destined for physics journals. It has RSS feeds, so scholars/academics/interested amateurs can monitor feeds for papers. And they now have added trackbacks, so that blog posts that discuss a particular article can be listed with the article in question, showing further discussion relating to the article. In other words, arXiv.org is making it easier for bloggers and blog readers to both access content and interact with archived content.

If I understand correctly, arXiv.org receives articles before they are printed (perhaps before they are submitted for print) and disseminates them. A blog called Cosmic Variance (link via Crooked Timber) discusses the basics for us non-physicists. Here's an excerpt:

Over the last fifteen years, the way that physicists communicate research results has been revolutionized by arxiv.org, the preprint server devised by Paul Ginsparg. Any time you write a paper, you send it to the arxiv, where its existence is beamed to the world the next day, and it is stored there in perpetuity. Along with the SPIRES service at SLAC, which keeps track of which papers have cited which other papers, physicists have a free, flexible, and easy-to-use web of literature that is instantly accessible to anyone. Most people these days post to the arxiv before they even send their paper to a journal, and some have stopped submitting to journals altogether. (I wish they all would, it would cut down on that annoying refereeing we all have to do.) And nobody actually reads the journals — they serve exclusively as ways to verify that your work has passed peer review.

So, the questions to discuss:

1. Let's start small: Should RBL have RSS feeds and the ability to trackback from a blog post to a review? Note that human editors at RBL would need to approve these trackbacks to prevent spam.

2. Thinking larger: What are the possibilities for a similar pre-press archive for Biblical Studies? Is the model of the Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism applicable (PDFs on the web until the journal is published)? What sorts of synergies would a service like that have with the academic journal publishers, and how could they peacefully co-exist?