Archiving

One of the traditional benefits of publishing in paper journals is that the physical copies that are bought by libraries serve, at least in principle, as a permanent record of an author's work.  A major concern about electronic publication is whether or not it is possible for the Internet  to serve a similar archival function.  The web is extremely dynamic. Site appear and disappear all the time.  It would be a great loss both to contributing authors and the profession at large if content of the Economics Bulletin were to become  unavailable in the future. We take this concern very seriously and have taken the following concrete steps to make the Economics Bulletin  credible as an archive for research.

• First, and most important, we have secured a guarantee from the library of the University of Illinois that they will continue to make the content of the Economics Bulletin publicly available on its web servers in the unfortunate event that the Bulletin ceases publication.  Of course we have no intention of ever ceasing publication, but if the unexpected happens, authors can be secure in the knowledge that the third largest university in the North America will make sure that everything they have published in the Bulletin will continue to be accessible for the indefinite future.  A formal statement of this guarantee may be seen at the bottom of this page.  
  
  

• Second, we have structured our database so that published papers will always be available at the URL's under which they were originally published.  You will safely be able to refer colleagues to your work and even create links in CV's and online reading lists to papers published in the Economics Bulletin at fixed, stable URL's.
    
  

• Third, given that the permanence and stability of  work published in the Economics Bulletin are not in question, the web offers significant advantages over physical journals  as a means of archiving research. The effort involved in  retrieving an article  from a paper journal stored somewhere in one's local library are far from  trivial.  This becomes even more significant if one's library does not happen to subscribe to the journal in question and an interlibrary loan is required.  In many cases, potentially relevant literature is probably ignored because it is simply too much trouble to dig it up. In contrast, having an article immediately available over the web, and being able to quickly search for and access other related work makes it much more likely that future researchers will take the time to read, refer to, and perhaps even learn from, previously published work.

Statement from the University Librarian 

of the

 University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana

The University of Illinois Library strongly backs the objectives of the Economics Bulletin. To support this effort and to help give authors confidence in the permanence of papers published in electronic journals, the University of Illinois Library offers the following guarantee:

Should the Economics Bulletin ever cease publication, The University Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign commits itself to continue to make its archived issues publicly available over the Internet.

Paula Kaufman

October 2000