Big news in the scientific blogging community: arXiv.org, arguably the world’s largest preprint repository, now supports trackbacks. Jacques Distler has some news on how it happened. « Peter Woit

I think there’s some very nice closure here, that the Internet was spawned from a scientific research project designed to share computing resources across physically separated campuses; several years later, the Internet gave something back to the scientific community in the sense of providing a more sophisticated means of networking comments.

They seem to be concerned about trackback spam though; not that I blame them. From the arXiv helpdesk:

Just as you need to be a registered author to submit papers, your weblog needs to be on an approved list, in order for your Trackbacks to appear. Going forward, the precise mechanism for getting on that list is yet to be determined. But, in the short term, the list of serious physicist-bloggers is short enough to handle by hand.