The Future Information Infrastructure in Economics

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William L. Goffe is Associate Professor of Economics and International Business, University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Robert P. Parks is Associate Professor of Economics, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri. Their e-mail addresses are Bill.Goffe@usm.edu and bparks@wuecona.wustl.edu, respectively. ^back

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The final draft of this paper was edited this way with Microsoft NetMeeting, and the increased productivity was striking.^back

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We distinguish online journals from electronic journals. The JEL is available electronically on CD-ROM but not via the Internet.^back

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Note that this does not necessarily mean the material is not copyrighted; rather, the restrictions on use would simply fall-the rights holder permits copying. This sort of copyright is common in some software, and the best example is the GNU (1991) ``copyleft''-copying is permitted, and the program can even be resold, but resellers cannot restrict further copying. Linux, claimed to be the world's second most popular version of Unix and authored by thousands of volunteers around the world, is ``copylefted.''^back

4.

Usenet is an electronic discussion system, sometimes known as news or netnews. It is similar to e-mail disucssion lists, but the messages are distributed with different technology. Some of the 20,000 or so newsgroups suffer from junk, while others do not.^back

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27,000 papers can easily be stored on a 9 gigabyte disk drive which costs $1600 or 5.9 cents per paper. If the drive is replaced every four years, and we include a $3400 computer every four years, and 100 hours per year maintenance of a $25 per hour system administrator, the total costs for four years is $11,600 or 55.5 cents per year per paper.^back

6.

There are many mixed journal projects: Johns Hopkins Press along with its collaborators have MUSE; Elsevier and nine U.S. universities have TULIP; Academic Press has IDEAL; and Kluwer and Dutch libraries have Pica. Chapman-Hall has a number of its print journals available online.^back

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Individually and together they are working on a number of projects that add distribution of their material by networks. The NSF, NASA and ARPA are funding the $24 million Digital Libraries program at Carnegie Mellon, the University of California (Berkeley), the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois, the University of California (Santa Barbara), and Stanford University (NSF, 1994); perhaps the largest move is a number of British publishers will make hundreds of their journals available online through U.K. libraries (Hitchcock et al., 1996) ^back

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The largest seems to be TCH-ECON. To subscribe, send e-mail to <majordomo@majordomo.elon.edu> with subscribe tch-econ in the body of the message.^back

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Many of these tools are freely available. While this may seem odd to economists, it partly stems from the Internet's genesis as a research and educational network. Some is done as a hobby by extremely skilled individuals (perhaps one of the few hobbies whose benefits can be enjoyed by millions), and for others the indirect pecuniary returns can be very substantial as these projects advertise skills to potential employers. Finally, note that the math and physics professions depend upon TeX and LaTeX for their word processing; these are freely available and are developed by volunteers.^back

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