Open Access

Open Access enables authors to obtain the maximum possible exposure for their work. Freely available papers are read more, cited more, and have more impact than ones available only to paid subscribers.^[1] As an experiment, enter a research topic into a search engine like Google and see how many links you obtain to papers published in traditional journals. You will find that most references are to working papers, not to published papers, because working papers are freely available.

The advent of the web has made free dissemination of research feasible and financially viable. Because existing specialty journals obtain revenues from selling subscriptions, primarily to libraries, access to the research they publish is limited. The attractive revenue stream that such subscriptions provide makes it unlikely that these journals will convert to Open Access. Thus a need exists for new refereed Open Access journals to replace existing journals. We believe that the establishment of a major Open Access journal in economic theory will lead others to establish Open Access journals for other fields of economics, reclaiming full control for the profession of its research output. We hope that this will lead the profession to a new norm in which all research is freely available.

Theoretical Economics is published by the Society for Economic Theory, a non-profit corporation devoted exclusively to the spread of scientific knowledge in economic theory. Financially the society needs only to recover the modest costs of operating a web-based journal, and is legally entitled to do no more. These costs are covered by modest submission fees and voluntary memberships.

^[1] For a recent careful study, see "Citation advantage of Open Access articles" by Gunther Eysenbach in PLoS Biology, 4(5), May 2006.