To all biblical studies journal publishers....

This is an open letter to all publishers of biblical studies journals,

Please update the way that you alert people of new issues. Some of you are doing a decent job, and some of you are not doing it all. For example,

1) Some are offering a regular text email, sometimes formatted with RIS to import directly to a bibliographic manager. That's pretty good too. But why email?
3) Those of you who have started to use RSS- good for you! The problem is that NONE of you are doing it right. Usually your RSS feed is a simple note of a new issue with no information. The other way is a post for every article- that is OVERKILL.

The current best publisher for alerting, IMO, is Cambridge. The email alert includes the entire issue and includes the abstract. But I ask again, why email? Why not an RSS feed with that info? And for the MAJORITY of publishers— let's get on the bandwagon. It costs you a few minutes per issue to cut and paste info into a blog to alert readers of new articles.

So here is my suggestion to you- If you have RSS abilities already, then make them better. ONE SINGLE rss entry whenever a new issue comes out. Include the abstract if available. The icing on the cake would be putting it in RIS format which can be imported right into bibliography managers for us computer geeks that use them.

Second, if you currently use email for alerts only — start offering the exact content of the email in a blog post. Pretty simple.

Third, if you don't alert the world at all via email or RSS feed, for goodness sake start doing it.

Fourth, if you haven't, read the blog post right after this one for an alternative way you can alert the world to your new issue.......

**EDIT**
For any publishers who may actually be listening, here is how you would format your RSS feed (or email to Fresh of the Press)
________________________________________
TY - JOUR
JA - Expository Times
VL - 120
IS - 12
PY - 2009
AU - DeLashmutt, Michael W.
T1 - Delusions and Dark Materials: New Atheism as Naïve Atheism and its Challenge to Theological Education
SP - 586-593
AB - This paper engages with New Atheism as reflected in the recent popular academic work of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens and the adolescent fiction of Philip Pullman. It asserts that New Atheism represents a challenge to theology not because of its philosophical critique or rigorous argumentation, but because it contributes to a popular cultural disposition which is uncritically anti-religious. Atheism itself is certainly not new, but the means by which the position of these New Atheists is articulated (ranging from popular books and films to bus advertisements) problematizes the task of theological education in a liberal Western society, such as that of modern Britain, by engendering a culture of naïve secularism. It is at this interface of popular culture and theological education that this evaluation of New Atheism hopes to offer its own critique of the critics.
ER -

TY - JOUR
JA - Journal for the Study of the New Testament
VL - 31
IS - 4
PY - 2009
AU - Sim, David C.
T1 - Matthew and the Pauline Corpus: A Preliminary Intertextual Study
SP - 401-422
AB - This study investigates the possibility that the author of Matthew's Gospel had access to the letters of Paul. Using the methods of intertextuality, it establishes criteria for determining whether this was indeed the case and concludes that it is more probable than not that the evangelist did know the Pauline epistles. An intertextual relationship between the Gospel and the Pauline corpus becomes clear once we understand that Matthew, as a Law-observant Christian Jew, was opposed to the more liberal theology of Paul. A single test case reveals that the evangelist was reacting to certain claims of the apostle expressed in his letters, and raises the prospect of further intertextual connections between these early Christian documents.
UR - http://jnt.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/31/4/401
ER -