Ezra Klein, responding to Seth Masket:
bq. All that said, political scientists make it extremely hard for the rest of us to benefit from all that study. The papers are locked away in obscure journals accessible only by expensive subscriptions. There are relatively few blogs dedicated to applying the insights of political science to the events of the day (but more than there used to be!). I don’t know of any organizations in the District dedicated to guiding journalists through the thickets of the discipline. Nor do many think tanks in Washington employ political scientists (one reason that economists are so dominant in this town is that they’re everywhere, and they spend most of their time talking to journalists on the phone)…journalists are making a terrible error if they judge political scientists irrelevant to the debate. But political science could do a lot more to meet those of us who want to listen halfway.
Every political scientist should have a webpage where ungated copies of their papers and articles are available. Period. When I want to blog about a particular political science article, I am probably going to find an ungated copy about 50% of the time. I sometimes email people to ask them to put the article on-line, but that seems an unnecessary hurdle.
I would also urge the APSA and political science journal publishers to consider making their content available for free to journalists who request it. I am told that _Nature_ and _Science_ will do so.
Ezra Klein loves him the political science. But the Washington Post doesn’t have a subscription to JSTOR. To be sure, free access to the wide world of political science won’t make journalists salivate over the latest issue of the _APSR_. But let’s at least make this problem one of demand, and not supply.