A Registration Concept for Articles Published on the Web

My husband is a computer scientist, and in his field there is not the 'either/or' mentality about putting research results on the web that seems to me to be found in medieval studies. He and his colleagues make their papers available on the web, through their own websites, as part of a process that often leads up to publication in a printed journal, often in a more polished version based on feedback and corrections of errors offered by associates who have read the web versions. In order to protect copyright, which remains anyway with the author until the paper is published in a journal, they (the authors) often make use of systems of registration for these papers that are provided by institutions with which they are affiliated. These systems do not vouch for the quality of a paper but simply confirm the date at which it appeared on the web, in case anyone else claims the result or claims to have written the paper. But once the paper is on the web, the author can direct colleagues to it who might be able to provide advice on the work or might like to draw on it (with proper citation) for their own research; and other scholars can locate the paper via the author's website, if they're interested. And if the paper is later accepted for publication in a print journal, then that information can be included in the web version as well -- which the journals like since it draws attention to them and thus, indirectly, brings new readers to the other articles they contain.

Is there anything like this system in medieval studies? A number of medievalists and historians I know have mentioned to me their fear of putting articles on their websites informally like this, because they think copyright is not protected -- they'll be scooped -- and b/c, they think, it means they cannot then offer the same article or a revised version to a print journal (they consider print journals generally more important than e-journals or their own websites) since it will be already 'published' and the print journals will no longer accept the work. But why shouldn't they, when journals in other fields do so?

A system of registration would be easy to maintain, e.g. by a listserv like EMF. It's just a question of keeping a list of any papers that have been registered, with the dates at which they appeared on the websites and their URLs.