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Public Policy e-Prints

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e-Print Archives

About e-Prints

 Electronic publishing has revolutionized scientific communications, as discussed in Wired Science by Herb Brody in the October 96 of Technology Review. Our Public Policy e-Print initiative is intended to extend this revolution to the public policy community. Conventional hard-copy publications operate at a sedate and leisurely pace unsuited to the rapidly developing policy debates of contemporary society. Too often months pass between the submission of an article its appearance in print, and authors risk either being overtaken by events, or being reduced to broad generalities. Further delays are imposed by editorial review, and articles must often must wait their turn for publication as editors seek to maintain a consistent number of pages in each issue of their publication, regardless of the supply of worthy texts. Increasingly, hardcopy journals serve as archival records of past debates, rather than directly impacting the accelerating policy discourse.

This e-Print archive includes the full texts of working papers, works in progress, and pre-prints [papers that will eventually in some form be published in hardcopy]. Submission of a text to this archive does not constitute "prior publication" and does not preclude subsequent publication in hardcopy, but it does afford authors the opportunity to make their works in progress available to a broader community for review and comment, as well as the opportunity to impact the policy process in a timely fashion.

Submissions

Please consider contributing your writings to these archives, which are open to a diverse range of perspectives. While we reserve the right to reject submissions that are obviously in error [no plans for time machines, please!], we are hoping to make this resource generally useful to the policy community. Although primarily intended as an archive of material not currently available in hardcopy, we are also interested in bringing material that has been published to the attention of a wider audience, as well as making material available online that otherwise might not be readily accessible to the online community.

All of the texts in these archives are available in English in HTML format. We urge submission in these formats whenever possible, as it greatly increases the utility for the online community, and reduces the amount of work that we have to do. We do have some semi-robust text format conversion gizmos, and generally have had pretty good luck with .DOC, .RTF and .WPD documents. We are also experimenting with machine language translation, which seems to produce usable though not entirely satisfactory results.

To submit your text, please contact the maintainer of the appropriate subject archive, or John Pike to suggest the formation of new archival topics.

Other e-Print Archives

Discussions of e-Prints

e-Print Archives

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