Why So Many Online Paper Archives?
There are many advantages to making your working papers available on-line. It allows you to get feedback, it creates exposure for a paper, and it allows you to take credit before the time consuming journal publishing process finally lets your paper see the light of day as an Article. Theoretically, all of this would work best if there were one system where all these papers are stored. Indeed in law and in economics everyone seems to have converged on SSRN as that place.
Not so in political science. The creation of the political science network has made SSRN more popular but it is still used quite sparingly. Instead, political methodologists post at the PolMeth archive, APSA conference goers at the APSA archive, MPSA participants at the MPSA archive, ISA participants at the ISA archive and so on. It is not just expensive for all these organizations to maintain these archives but it also creates inefficiencies in the dissemination of papers. For example, Google Scholar does not search all of these archives. Moreover, it is not always easy to update these papers after a conference participation. It also likely leads to multiple versions of the same working paper, making it difficult to determine what the most recent version is.
I can think of some good reasons why this persists. For example, PolMeth is a pretty closely knit community who would like to keep up to date with what people within that community are doing. SSRN allows you to set up your own communities but these get “contaminated” quickly. For the most part, though, I suspect that internal organizational dynamics are responsible for this. Or is there something about SSRN that I am not getting?
Comments
Polmeth is great because it’s so easy to submit to. Arxiv is a pain in the ass. I seem to recall that SSRN isn’t so easy either. Nor is NBER, I believe.
Posted by: Andrew Gelman | January 19, 2010 11:33 AM
I agree that PolMeth is by far the best of the bunch (and better than SSRN) and that it serves its purpose very well. But it only works within a certain community. For instance, I just did a search for your paper “Prior distributions for Bayesian data analysis in political science” on scholar google. The version on your Columbia web-site shows up but not the Polmeth one. On SSRN, I sometimes get 100 downloads within a month or so of posting as well as random people sending me comments.
Posted by: Erik | January 19, 2010 02:29 PM
I have a (probably irrational) dislike of SSRN. There’s something very irritating about the site. Opening page has frames, which the nerd in me hates. Whenever I find a link that I think might take me somewhere interesting, I seem to have to login - and I don’t want to be forced to do that all the time. I thought the idea was an open repository of work, but my abiding feeling is one of restriction when I’m on the site.
Posted by: Tim Hicks | January 19, 2010 07:42 PM
I really wish there were a standard site for non-PolMeth stuff. What would it take to get political scientists to converge on SSRN (which I agree is an ugly, ungainly site, but which is the best thing out there?) If people started posting links to SSRN on their homepages instead of archiving the actual articles there, would that help?
Posted by: Julie Lynch | January 20, 2010 08:02 AM