postgenomic.com Wow. Found via Science Library Pad.

Very, very, very cool. The trackback thing in Arxiv was kind of cool, but with the editorial policy (via) and all, doesn't perhaps have the ability to work so well.

Why not try something like this for physics? I'd love to see it.


Update: I read the posting on the editorial policy and the thoughtful comments that went along with it yesterday when I left work. The more I think about it, the worse I think the policy is. The problem, as I see it, is that many new ideas come from outsiders or boundary folks who publish in interdisciplinary places or in other disciplines. Yeah, there's the whole invisible college thing, but every community needs some gatekeepers who are boundary spanners. These people won't get to comment on the arXiv papers and have the trackbacks appear -- by definition. Also, it would be one thing if physicists only posted physics papers to arXiv. As it turns out, they publish citation analyses, bibliometrics, scientometrics, information seeking/use, social network analysis, etc., papers. So a physicist can publish something totally outside of his field -- in my field, for example -- and I can't reply because I'm not a practicing physicist? Huh. I would like to point out the fascinating conversation on the SIGMETRICS-L in re the prestige vs. popularity article on arXiv -- this is a good example of how visibility of the conversation would be helpful for people encountering the article on arXiv.

Update 2: Turns out that there exists something for the same purposes, if not the same, in physics. It's called Physics Comments: Scholarly Discussion of Physics Note, too, on the lhs, down a bit, "Focused Forums." Hmm... informal scholarly sci/tech comms...  ¶ 5:49 PM| |cites (technorati) |