William L. Goffe
and
Robert P. Parks
Computers have already changed the lives of economists. The estimation of econometric models, the manipulation of data sets, word processing, and literature searches through EconLit are just a few examples of their impact. However, computers attached to networks may dramatically change our professional lives. The profession is now beginning to take full advantage of electronic mail and mailing lists, online access to card catalogs and U.S. government data. However, these changes may be only the beginning. Economists are now starting to participate in an online working paper culture, with more than 4,000 online working papers at last count; see EconWPA and WoPEc. Back issues of six economics journals (including the American Economic Review and the Journal of Economic Perspectives) are now available online (JSTOR), and a few other economics journals have current articles online (e.g., Applied Economics).
An optimistic vision of the future might best be demonstrated with the following vignette:
Dr. Smith, reading an article in the latest JPE online with his PC in California, was surprised by a footnote that cited a recent article in the AER. He clicked on the reference, searched the AER article, and quickly found the results of a key regression. He had not followed this literature for several years, and it was counter to his experience. Opening up another window, he tapped into the AEA's online archive for the paper's data set in Tennessee and retrieved them. He then ran the regression, tried additional diagnostics, and modified the specification. He was surprised to find that the results were quite robust. Curious about other recent results in this literature, he then moved to the paper's references and clicked his mouse on several related papers to jump to their online versions via a hypertext link (he was thankful those journals were online, as his small library did not carry their paper versions). He then recalled that he could use this procedure for a project he thought about long ago, if he could remember where he saw the data set. He then opened up a window to the AEA's index of data sets in economic publications (an outgrowth of EconLit). He soon found the data set online at a journal archive in New Zealand. He contacted one of his graduate students in Virginia and they began an online audio conference. They opened their word processors in ``conference'' mode and began jointly and simultaneously outlining and writing a new article--together editing, modifying, and pasting new regressions results and graphs.1 In an hour, they had a new paper partially written.
In short, a fully networked world could offer much easier access to the working papers, articles, bibliographical information, and data that lies at the heart of much research and teaching. Indeed, some of this information is currently freely available at your desk through your computer (and it can be printed locally if desired). However, the path to the future is likely to be tumultuous. After all, technological change may not only alter existing practices, but may usher in entirely different institutional arrangements. In Scovill (1995), a report written by librarians, authors and publishers, three scenarios of the future are described including two where some publishers perish. The following scenarios are somewhat different given the different focus for this paper.
In one scenario, the technology of moving and storing information changes, but no fundamental change occurs in the relationships between librarians, publishers and readers. Although information will flow over networks, it will not be much more accessible. Instead, information will still be tucked away in distant libraries where you have no privileges, or at publishers' servers where you must purchase it. In this vision, libraries and publishers will play roughly traditional roles--publishers hold copyrights, libraries store information and journals, and they and users may pay fees for the electronic copies of material. In short, this future roughly maintains the status quo.
A second possibility is that scholarly material becomes freely available on the Internet, but is unorganized and all but impossible to find. This scenario could be labeled the ``Field of Dreams Approach''--put it out there, and they will find it. This seems unlikely to us, since rational authors should quickly realize that readers will not find their work. At last count, there were tens of millions of web pages; one Internet search engine, AltaVista, recently found more than 1,000,000 documents containing the word ``economic,'' and more than 5,000 with ``Adam Smith.'' And in fact these publicly available web search engines only index a ``only a small, flawed, arbitrary and not even random sample of what is on the web today... 31 million pages...out of as many as 150 million pages'' (Pike, 1997).
Even if commercial search engines improve their abilities to sift the wheat from the chaff, it is doubtful that they will concentrate much on the academic arena. Authors who want their work to be read will need to post their papers to a working paper archive like EconWPA, or register the paper with an index like WoPEc.
We argue for a better future, in which information will be easily found and accessed. This paper offers a conceptual view of how computer networks should change the way we work. The guiding philosophical principle behind our discussion is that in academia, a primary goal is the growth, acquisition, and dissemination of knowledge, which is aided by the freest possible access to information produced by and for academics. Many academic practices illustrate this approach: publication of results, freely available material in libraries, conferences open to all, non-profit maximizing academic organizations, and free or inexpensive working papers. Throughout our discussion, it is important to keep this principle of greatest possible access to academic information at the lowest possible cost in mind. From this point of view, we examine the flow of information in the profession and how it might change with the arrival of computer networks. We begin by discussing the impact of computer networks and the information technology on working papers, journals, libraries, data, and indices to information. Then, we will look at altogether new opportunities which may arise, and suggest a roadmap for moving to a networked world.
We hope that this paper will encourage debate in our profession about how to organize the flow of information that is critical to our professional lives. This paper also contains a brief overview of how networks will influence academia; more details and speculation can be found in Okerson and O'Donnell (1995), Scovill (1995), Peek and Newby (1996), Hitchcock et al. (1996), and many issues of the Journal of Electronic Publishing. Bailey (1996) contains a very extensive bibliography.