Late last week, a few magical words appeared on the website for the “Journal of Economic Perspectives”:http://www.aeaweb.org/jep/index.php.
bq. Online issues of the Journal of Economic Perspectives published since 1999 are now publicly accessible at no charge, compliments of the American Economic Association.
JEP, of course, has an analogous publication in political science, _Perspectives on Politics._ While I do not know the organizational history of its founding, I presume that the similarity in names is not a coincidence, and that POP was launched, at least in part, to provide a political science equivalent to JEP. That is, a journal which would both debate broad issues within the field of political science, and build bridges between political science and broader public debates.
Which raises an obvious question: shouldn’t APSA follow the American Economics Association’s lead, and start making _Perspectives_ freely available online? Jeff Isaac, _Perspectives’_ current editor, stated the journal’s editorial philosophy at the beginning of this year, in an article entitled “Perspectives on Politics: A Political Science Public Sphere”:http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayIssue?jid=PPS&volumeId=8&issueId=01&iid=7322532. I quote:
bq. Finally, broad and relevant discussion is important to the communities and constituencies beyond the academy to whom political scientists are necessarily connected. We draw on these communities and constituencies as sources of the themes we analyze. We also draw on them for the resources that support institutions of higher learning and advanced research, and for the civil freedoms that we exercise in the course of our intellectual work. And we contribute to these communities and constituencies, as teachers, as experts, as producers of social scientific research and scholarship, and as writers more generally. There is an ethical responsibility, especially in a democratic society, for the social sciences—and especially for political science—to take seriously our connections to this broader public world and the human challenges and opportunities these connections present. In promoting such seriousness, Perspectives seeks to foster mutually enlightening discussion between political science and the broader public worlds inhabited by journalists, politicians, military leaders, NGOs, citizen organizations, etc. (one good example of this is the recent Perspectives book review symposium on the U.S. Army Counterinsurgency Manual, which has generated extensive discussion in the military blogosphere). Perspectives provides an institutional space for a kind of broad and synthetic discussion that enriches more specialized scholarly and theoretical discussion at conferences and in peer-reviewed journals and books and that also enhances the more general intellectual and public character and relevance of the profession.
This is all to the good – and I think that _Perspectives_ is doing as good a job at this as it can do, given the strictures that it operates under. But the key part here is the “strictures that it operates under” bit. It’s really hard to fulfil the “ethical responsibility” that Isaac talks about if your contributions to debate are hidden behind a paywall and cost substantial amounts of money to access. One of the most persistent complaints I hear from political science-friendly journalists is purely and simply that they _can’t access the research._ The same is true of a broader set of writers and intellectuals. If they can’t read what we are saying, it’s no wonder that they don’t pay enough attention to us.
Perhaps this could be justified as long as other professional organizations were doing the same thing. But that isn’t true any longer. I see _no justification whatsoever_ for continuing to hide _Perspectives_ behind a paywall when the American Economic Association is providing full, unfettered access to its cognate journal. Political science is supposed to communicate to a broader public. We political science bloggers do bits and pieces here and there to push research as much as we can. Sometimes (as with Paul Staniland’s guest posts in the last several days), we do a lot of work to try to summarize internal debates for outsiders and to draw out the publicly salient implications. But we’re working without any professional support, and there is only so much we can do. _Perspectives_ is the obvious vehicle for a genuine, concerted outreach effort by political scientists to broader debates. Indeed, such outreach is supposed to be part of its mandated mission. But as long as it is effectively inaccessible to the public, it cannot fulfill this vocation.
To be absolutely clear: this is an issue which cannot be decided by _Perspectives’_ editorial team. Any decision would have to be made at the level of APSA itself. And there presumably would be contractual issues with Cambridge University Press, which publishes _Perspectives._ But the fact that the American Economics Association has decided to provide open access shows that it can be done. If you agree with the basic arguments of this post, I’d ask you to _politely_ push them to anyone you know who holds any office in APSA. It’s long past time that APSA did this – but getting action is going to require some politics. Which is a topic that we (in theory) should know quite a lot about.
