September 05, 2004

Blogging APSA

Posted by Henry

Over the next few days, I’m going to be trying to put together an annotated list of those papers at APSA that might be interesting to CT readers. It’s a very frustrating task. APSA uses database software that generates unique session IDs. The result is that it’s simply impossible to provide stable URLs for papers in the APSA database - the URLs are session specific, and anyone else trying to use them gets booted to a page asking for login and password. This seems to me to be counterproductive. It means that it’s difficult for political scientists to spread the word about interesting papers to their colleagues. It also makes it much more difficult to get relevant papers out into the wider public debate. There are a whole lot of bloggers attending APSA this year, some of whom have quite a wide general readership. It would be nice if they were able to disseminate some of the interesting papers easily to their readers.

Posted on September 5, 2004 05:43 PM UTC
Comments

At the risk of diverting this thread before it even gets started, I’d like to take a moment here to mourn the end of comments over at Matthew Yglesias’s site.

Posted by faisal · September 5, 2004 07:21 PM

I don’t know about APSA, but a lot of organizations make money selling things like standards documents and conference proceedings. Letting people post pointers cuts directly into their (perceived) revenue stream.

APSA presumably assumes that their papers are so good that anybody who’s interested in the subject will be willing to cough up a few bucks. Their institution pays for it anyway.

Like you said, counterproductive.

Posted by lightning · September 5, 2004 08:54 PM

isn’t the APSA “proceedings” site free?

Posted by one · September 8, 2004 02:49 PM

Yes, it’s free - but the way in which they’ve set up the site makes it really difficult to disseminate papers elsewhere - as I said in the post, there are no permanent links.

Posted by Henry · September 8, 2004 03:05 PM

Yes, it’s free - but the way in which they’ve set up the site makes it really difficult to disseminate papers elsewhere - as I said in the post, there are no permanent links.

Posted by Henry · September 8, 2004 03:05 PM
Followups

This discussion has been closed. Thanks to everyone who contributed.