John Eckstein, a loyal MR reader, writes:
NBER is still charging $5 to download a working paper [for non-academics]. Don’t economists want to get their work out to the broadest audience possible? Given the number of downloads for most economic working papers it seems like the fee is just enough to discourage the dissemination of information, but not enough to raise significant funds. The budget is not on the NBER website so I can’t check it myself.
I get these papers free, but that is because GMU pays a fee to NBER. The real source of money, Alex suggests, is from selling NBER membership to universities (inelastic demanders, just ask Kluwer), and that requires a nominal fee to stop professors from downloading it themselves. Still, so many other institutions offer free access, and now with the advent of blogging many non-academics want to read NBER papers too. Cannot the current system be reformed?
The thing that really puzzles me is that, almost every time you link to an NBER paper, you link to a non-gated version. So who’s paying the $5? What can it possibly be deterring? And why are universities paying at all? Is it worth the convenience to their professors of one-stop shopping? Do they just not understand Google?
Actually the entire field of academic publishing is due for a complete reboot, not just economics.
I think the fee is fine, but there are some caveats.
I’ve bought a couple NBER papers for the five bucks. I received plenty of consumer surplus from the transaction.
I’m not an academic, but I am a researcher and the papers have been valuable. Buying all of NBER’s papers would cost a pretty penny, so I have to do some presearch. I have to find out what I expect to take out of the paper — and it’s not always in the abstract.
I haven’t found a lemon paper from NBER yet, but I have in other journals (and they usually charge $20-$40 per paper). It’s usually not that the paper is bad, it just didn’t contain what I expected. I’d love to get a refund, but I can see how there could be problems doing so.
NBER will let you have papers for free if you have an email address ending in .ro, for example. Get one, for free, in minutes, and you’re done.
I can see that NBER charges the fee to keep its library subscriptions paid up, but it makes no sense for authors to gate their work that way. Authors should *want* their work widely-disseminated. Perhaps they prefer the NBER cachet (so-and-so, of Harvard, NBER and God Squad, etc…) to staying on the outside/putting their stuff on SSRN. OTOH, they may not be interested in communicating with non-academics :\
I’ve never understood why so many journals are locked behind pay-to-read walls. Why couldn’t the federal government subsidize journals in order to put every single article ever produced online for free? Yes, there would be some problems here (how would you treat the dozens of new journals that might pop up to take advantage of the subsidy, etc?), but I imagine they could be worked out.
John Eckstein,
Try finding the author’s homepage (often linked by NBER), (I’m approximating) 80% of the time you can find a non-gated download in his vita or usually there is a publications/papers section.
I have access for free to Nber because I live in the Third World.
By the way Uk University sites charge you as many as 30 Pounds for 48 hours
If you want free papers, just sign up for an email with Yahoo India–then you have a email address that appears to be from India (I simply use India because the site is in English), and use that when asking for access.
Techie Solution: Block academic IP addresses from free downloads unless the University has a subscription. Free otherwise.
I’ve worked at universities that subscribe to NBER and ones that don’t.
I think the fee is a way for NBER to solve a prisoners’ dilemma between dean’s and libraries.
Faculty just want the papers.
But, libraries don’t want to pay for working papers and then again indirectly when the paper is published. They also are concerned about buying items that don’t have a sustained checkout lifetime.
Deans don’t want to pay either. They view this as a nasty way for the library to shift costs (which has some basis).
The prisoners’ dilemma is that they are both steering towards an equilibrium where the NBER series is unavailable on campus. The small fee encourages faculty to push a bit away from that position.
Rahul, if free meant “low-quality junk” wouldn’t the OA journals tend to receive fewer citations from other authors, not more? Academics can use their footnotes to vote on the quality of others’ work, just as webmasters can use their outgoing links. (Citation statistics is where the Google founders got the idea of PageRank, by the way.)
I worked for a newspaper, not a university, so an institutional subscription to NBER was not a possibility. I did once or twice pay for an individual article, but usually the reason I wanted to read an article was to determine whether it was something I could write about, and given the success rate — about one in 10 — $5 for a peek was far from trivial. Mostly, if I couldn’t find a non-gated version, or the author wouldn’t send me one, I just never wrote about the research at all.
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