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In the course of my day, I tend to spend a fair amount of time clicking around the university pages of academics and downloading the rough drafts amassed in the "working papers" section. But the proliferation of accessible "working papers," rather than final products, is baffling. Henry Farrell, however, offers up some insight:
Because of copyright issues, academics often don’t publish the final versions of their papers to the web (indeed the trouble is often getting them to publish any version at all). And even when they do, there usually isn’t any simple or obvious way of finding out which is the most recent non-paywalled version of a piece without emailing the author to ask.What exactly are the "copyright issues?" And why is so much content locked up in pricey journals? Much of this research is being conducted on the public dime, but is utterly inaccessible to the public. The journals might have made sense when you needed some sort of archiving and distribution model to store, categorize, and spread research, but with the advent of the internet, their existence serves to foil those efficient dissemination of relevant research. Do they simply survive because the prestige they confer as gatekeepers plays an important role in rankings and advancement? Or is there some crucial purpose I'm missing entirely?
