Things have been quite exciting of late. The energy of Alun Salt has been playing out over on the Ancient World Bloggers Group, with a proposal for a new kind of journal :

“The Past Discussed Quarterly will be a journal published four times a year. There’s no intention to compete for the same market as any other journals, nor to replace weblogs. Instead the journal is a bridge between bloggers in the broadest sense and non-blogging academics. The journal will be available as a PDF for free under a CC licence and paper format at the minimum allowed cost via Lulu. The journal will reproduce articles and entries from weblogs, providing a citeable format for people uncomfortable with citing weblogs. Additionally it’s intended that an XHTML or TEI format will be archived, initially with Tom Elliott and hopefully later with ISAW. This will provide a permanent curated archive for webloggers’ work. Submission will be similar to a blog carnival, though the need for permissions to re-print entries adds a little more to the process of submitting.”

This is a very exciting project to be a part of, especially for someone like me who puts a lot of energy into this whole blog thing. I believe that academic blogs should be regarded by the rest of the academy as a legitimate scholarly pursuit, and there is potential here for a new kind of publishing that bridges blogs and journals.

Watch this space. Big things are happening!