Tag: Electronic publishing

An issue of the American Economic Review celebrating the 100th anniversary of the journal in 2011.

The American Economic Association (AEA) was founded in 1885 and is the leading organization of business and academic economists in the United States. It first began publishing the American Economic Review (AER) in 1911. The AER remains the leading academic economic journal in the United States. Like most other academic journals, in recent years the AER has been available in both digital format and in paper copies mailed to subscribers. In January 2024, the AEA announced that the paper version of the journal will soon end:

“The AEA will phase out print journals over the next year by no longer offering print subscriptions for members and institutional subscribers as of February 1.  Existing print subscriptions for members and institutions will be honored through January 2025 but will be unable to be renewed.”

The transition of the AER from a paper-only to a digital-only format has been a long one, strecthing over three decades. The tranisition began in the 1990s when the development of the internet made electronic publishing feasible. An important step in making academic journals available electronically was the establishment by William Bowen of the Mellon Foundation of JSTOR in 1994. JSTOR was intended to make electronic versions of back issues of academic journals available inexpensively to libraries and other institutions.

Typically, at the end of a year, libraries would send the issues of academic journals published during that year to be bound into volumes. The libraries would then put the volumes on library shelves making them available to faculty, students, and researchers. University libraries that subscribed to large numbers of academic journals found that over time they were devoting more and more space to shelving bound volumes of academic journals. Many libraries began storing the volumes off site in warehouses, making the volumes less accessible to faculty and students. JSTOR made it possible for libraries to store back issues of journals electronically rather than physically. Many academic societies, like the AEA, were happy to allow JSTOR to make electronic copies of the back issues of their journals. Although academic societies often fund their activities in part from subscriptions to their journals, the societies earned little or no revenue from back issues of their journals.

During the 1990s, the AEA and other academic societies began to make current issues of some journals available on CD-ROMs as more factulty began to use personal computers that had those drives available. Many faculty—including Glenn and Tony!—found the CD-ROM versions of journal issues a little awkward and time consuming to use. CD-Roms never became an important way of distributing journal issues to subscribers. (This article published in 1997 by Hal Varian, who was then at the University of California, Berkeley and is now the chief economist at Google, provides an interesting discuss of the AEA’s first steps toward transitioning its journals to electronic formats.)

By the 2000s, the AEA was offering subscribers to the AER the choice of electronic-only subscriptions—with issues available for download on the AEA’s website—or electronic access along with print copies at a higher annual price. This model was one widely used by non-academic magazines and newspapers. As the number of subscribers receiving print copies of the AER dwindled, the leadership of the AEA eventually decided to eliminate print copies, as indicated in the announcement quoted at the beginning of this post.

For better or worse, in most fields, print copies of academic journals seem to be well on their way to extinction.