Eoin Purcell

What’s the line: Brevity is Clarity?
Whatever it is, The Girl Who’s Afraid of Foxes has a wonderfully brief and pointed post about scholarly journals. It prompted me to have a look around and see what people were thinking in this field which I think will move that direction very soon anyway purely because it can and still profit.

Obviously places like Peter Suber Open Access blog and Nature’s blog network are places to keep your eyes open for more news on this type of development, but I liked this too:

PDQ is a journal designed to provide a bridge between blogging and academia. It will provide stable citeable references for selected weblog posts focussed upon or of interest to the pre-Renaissance past. It is compiled from articles submitted by bloggers on a quarterly basis.

The Past Discussed Quarterly is here and some more rationale here:

Weblogs are transitory and may disappear at short notice. The same can be said of print publications, it can be difficult to secure a copy of a publication if its gone out of print -especially if the print run was only a couple of hundred copies. Weblogs can also be edited which means that two people citing the same URL might not be citing the same text. PDQ aims to provide a canonical version of the article in a citation-friendly format. It also aims to preserve included entries for a long period of time.

Sounds sensible I think you’ll agree!

Fulfills my history urge quite nicely, sometimes I almost forget how much I enjoyed studying it.
Eoin

PS Don’t forget Lapham’s Quarterly either!