Comments on: Why discussion paper archives should not allow the removal of items http://blog.repec.org/2011/08/20/why-discussion-paper-archives-should-not-allow-the-removal-of-items/ Information about Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) Tue, 07 May 2013 15:56:20 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Christian Zimmermann http://blog.repec.org/2011/08/20/why-discussion-paper-archives-should-not-allow-the-removal-of-items/#comment-633 Sun, 21 Aug 2011 00:18:26 +0000 http://blog.repec.org/?p=598#comment-633 Ekkehart summarizes very well the reasons why a working paper should not be withdrawn. Yet we routinely see this happening, and often it is not because of an error or a revision, but because of a mistaken belief that once a paper is published in a journal, its discussion paper version should disappear. Many authors also remove working papers from their profiles under these circumstances. This is bad because it cuts the links between the versions. Hence someone who cannot read a gated article will not know about a readable working paper version, and somebody looking at a working paper will never know it was published.

It should be noted that most publishers now allow pre-prints (discussion papers) to remain online, and many even allow post-prints. For a list of publisher policies in this regard, see SHERPA/RoMEO.

We also occasionally see archive maintainers “cleaning up” old working papers. Authors then complain to us that their rankings drop, in particular for downloads. Indeed, working papers are downloaded much more frequently than articles. But beyond the statistics, this again a wrong policy, as Ekkehart has shown above.

]]> By: feenberg http://blog.repec.org/2011/08/20/why-discussion-paper-archives-should-not-allow-the-removal-of-items/#comment-632 Sat, 20 Aug 2011 21:13:18 +0000 http://blog.repec.org/?p=598#comment-632 At the NBER we have had 16,000 working papers in 32 years, and I only recall one withdrawn, so that has not been a clerical burden. In any case it is just a matter of changing the bibliographic entry to missing and removing the world read permission on the .pdf. If it happened every day, we would make a cgi-script and let the author do it himself.

If the author believes the paper is incorrect – should we compel him to flaunt his error? Would that discourage submissions? Doesn’t that rule have very bad incentives, in that an author denied the ability to withdraw a paper may be tempted to defend it?

We do save the original paper and could produce it should some controversy require so. We also keep all revisions, and while we only offer the latest version through links on the website, the early versions are still available through a URL we provide to the author, if he wishes to disseminate that or if some priority dispute requires it. But that has not happened yet that I am aware of. A revision date is added to the title page so that readers are informed that the working paper number does not reflect the final revision..

When I was young I worked in a laboratory whose discussion papers were watermarked “Not for citation or attribution”. I wouldn’t want our authors to revert to that.

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