APSA papers: The Sequel

by Henry Farrell on March 8, 2007

It’s probably getting on towards bedtime in the Netherlands, so Ingrid may not have seen that Michael Brintnall, executive director of APSA, has “responded in comments”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/03/07/papers-for-sale/#comment-189268

The annual meeting papers are not meant to be sold, and All Academic is taking them down. It was a mistake that caused them to be up for sale at that site, and we regret it. … The papers are on-line at www.politicalscience.org as part of the PROl initiative. This is an open-access site, operated as a collaboration of APSA and a large number of other political science associations. It’s an extension of APSA’s PROceedings site, where papers are posted for each annual meeting, and it brings together scholarship from a host of other annual meetings too. It’s a good place to search for early scholarship, and I encourage you to use it. All-Academic is the contractor that we use to set up the site. There was some recent confusion about their including our papers in their own for-sale data base. None of the papers from the politicalscience.org project is meant to be at the All Academic site for sale and they are removing them. … I hope this hiccup with All Academic doesn’t fuel any cynicism about making early scholarship like this available on an open access basis – it’s the purpose of the politicalscience.org project, and it’s what academic discourse is about.

This seems to me to be a perfectly gracious response and explanation. As noted in comments, I would like to see APSA consider a different technology – politicalscience.org’s current system has session specific links, which means that e.g. bloggers can’t easily link to interesting political science papers. A system with permalinks like arXiv would allow for much better circulation of political science papers in the general public conversation. But that’s a topic for a different day.

March, 2003: On the Record

by Kieran Healy on March 8, 2007

Via “Jim Henley”:http://highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2007/03/07/6058 I see there’s a “challenge”:http://www.slumdance.com/blogs/brian_flemming/archives/002515.html from Brian Flemming:

bq. If you are a blogger who was active in March 2003, link to that month’s archive and write an entry called ‘What I was wrong about in March 2003.’

“Gene Healy”:http://www.affbrainwash.com/genehealy/archives/021991.php comes out looking pretty good. “Glenn Reynolds”:http://instapundit.com/archives2/003000.php maybe not so much. Amongst other things in March 2003, I turned thirty and got married. I was on my honeymoon in San Francisco when the war began. Here are “all my posts”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2003/03/ from March 2003 (in pages of ten). I was wrong about how long it would take Saddam’s regime to collapse. And I was wrong in thinking that the option of bailing out fast was perhaps more likely than that of the U.S. taking on the role of occupying colonial power. But, not to put too fine a point on it, I was pretty much fucking right about everything else. Below the fold, some representative selections. All emphases in the original, as we say in the ivory tower.

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