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The American Economic Association publishes a suite of 10 academic journals: one of them is the Journal of Economic Perspectives, where I have worked as Managing Editor for 39 years. Starting in February 2025, none of these journals is going to be printed on paper. For more than a decade now, the JEP has been freely available on-line, including the current issue and all the archives. Articles in the other AEA journals require access through an AEA membership or via a library subscription.

I remember when we were designing the first physical issue of JEP back in 1986. In those pre-Internet days, one issue was what kind of paper to use: it went without saying that we would use library-grade paper that would last more than 100 years, but we still needed to think about the thickness and whiteness of the paper. Those discussions feel weirdly anachronistic now.

Back in the 1980s, the JEP sought to take advantage of the newfangled personal computer technology. We were one of the first journals in economics (maybe the first?) to require all authors to send us their first draft on a floppy disk, which was then a 5 1/4-inch square, fragile enough that when sending it through the mail in those pre-Internet days, you first slipped the disk into a cardboard envelope so it wouldn’t be injured in transit. I would edit the paper on the actual computer file. We would send the edited file back to the author on another disk for further revisions. We spent several thousand dollars a year on overnight mail, shipping physical disks, and we shipped physical galley proofs on paper between typesetters, authors, and the JEP editorial offices as well. But with the arrival of email attachments, we haven’t spent a dime on overnight mail for years now.

In a number of ways, this shift to a paperless journal is not only efficient and effective, but even poetic. The JEP started with the idea that we didn’t need to ship paper back and forth as part of receiving articles, doing comments and editing, and getting revisions. Now, we don’t need to ship paper for readers to see the finished journal, either.

Back in those early issues of JEP in the late 1980s, the printer created about 28,000 copies of each issue. It was roughly a tractor-trailer worth of paper. But over the years, fewer and fewer readers wanted to pay to receive paper copies. In the last few years, it turns out that even most academic libraries don’t want the paper copies, either. For the final paper issue in Fall 2024, we were printing only a little more than 2,000 copies.

Of course, having access to the articles in the JEP via the internet is vastly more accessible than having to track down one of those 28,000 paper copies from the old days. A rough count suggests that the average JEP article is downloaded in PDF form more than 60,000 times. Those who want to download an entire issue can do so as well.

The cost of producing the journal is lower, too. When looking at the JEP annual budget up into the early 2000s, it was a reasonable rule-of-thumb that printing and postage costs were about half of the total. Those cost have been diminishing over time, and now will vanish. The total budget for the JEP is published each year in the “Report of the Treasurer” of the American Economic Association. Total cost of the JEP was projected in May 2024 at $772,000 (final audited figures will be available later in 2025). Back in 2009 the total cost of the journal was projected at $882,000.

The comparison of JEP costs between 2009 and the the present isn’t quite apples-to-apples: for example, because the allocation of some internal costs at the AEA production process are now treated differently. But that said, the general increases in salaries and other costs for those working at the journal over the last 15 years have been more than offset by the decline in printing and mailing costs. Thus, the JEP is now both far more easily and cheaply accessible, because it’s freely online, and also less expensive to produce.

But as the kind of person who squints up at every sunny sky, wondering about storms, I find myself pondering two potential costs that that these calculations may not be taking into account.

In the short-run, there is a shift from physical to digital proximity. When I was on the high school debate team, a half-century ago, we would go to the University of Minnesota libraries after school to do research. For me, a common pattern was to find the book or report or article that I was looking for–but then also to find that the other books on the same shelf, or other reports in the same series, or other articles in that issue or in a more recent issue were even more useful to me. (Yes, I was definitely a fun teenager.) There was a physical serendipity to research and to learning.

It’s possible to mimic this physical closeness with online tools. I’ve seen a “virtual library shelf” where you can see the books that would have been shelved side-by-side. If you look up a report or an article, it’s usually straightforward to look up the series of reports, or the other articles in the issue, or other issues of a publication. Perhaps the 21st century version of teenage (and adult) me will both search for document and skim the “neighboring” ones.

But at least in the current state of technology, skimming seem harder to me. Clicking through neighboring volumes, and chapters in those volumes, remains harder for me than yanking volumes of shelves. Also, when I have a physical copy of a journal or report or book, it sits on my desk for a few days (or more!). I’m reminded of what’s in the issue multiple times as I see it, and reminded again even when I decide to throw the physical copy away. As the journal goes paperless, readers no longer have a paper version sitting in their in-basket, or their desk, or a coffee-table in the economics department lounge. Instead, readers receive an email that a new issue has been published, mixed in with the deluge of other emails that arrive each day, and soon buried under tomorrow’s deluge of emails.

Another way to phrase this tradeoff is that the extraordinary accessibility of so many articles, journals, and reports via the internet can make it harder to set priorities over what might be important to keep around for a longer look. Not everything can have top priority, after all.

In the long-run, the issue is that when the JEP was starting and we were worrying about library-grade paper, we had no doubt that the paper would actually last at least 100 years. After all, I have personally looked up books and reports that were more than 100 years old. Digitized records of old books and journal are based on the paper copies held in libraries.

But will the digital record of the journal still be available in 50 or 100 years? Will readers still be using Adobe Acrobat PDF files five or ten decades from now? Will companies still be supporting the necessary software, and the underlying operating systems? Will the hardware of that time, 100 years from now, be well-suited to reading this text? It’s easy to say “yes,” but ongoing digital access doesn’t happen without ongoing investment. There are plenty of examples of digital data and information from decades ago either aren’t accessible easily, or aren’t accessible at all, because the ongoing investment in hardware and software to keep them accessible didn’t happen.

Maxwell Neely-Cohen of the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School tackles this issue in “Century-Scale Storage” that is, “If you had to store something for 100 years, how would you do it?” There are some commonsensical rules.

For example, the Smithsonian endorses  a “3-2-1 Rule” when it comes to data storage: “3 copies of the data, stored on 2 different media, with at least 1 stored off-site or in the cloud.”  Or as archivist Trevor Owens puts it in his seminal text Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation,  “In digital preservation we place our trust in having multiple copies. We cannot trust the durability of digital media, so we need to make multiple copies.” When storing digital data, archivists recommend utilizing file formats that are widespread and not dependent on a single commercial entity—in the words of the Smithsonian, “non-proprietary, platform-independent, unencrypted, lossless, uncompressed, [and] commonly used.” But at the century scale, even our most widely adopted file formats are completely untested.

When it comes to very long-term storage and retrieval, there is also a tendency to assume that someone else is thinking about it, and somewhere up in “the cloud,” it’s all being taken care of. For the ordinary dangers like an occational power outage, this assumption seems reasonable. But when thinking about safe storage and access over a century, the question becomes whether there is protection against extreme and unexpected events. There are three main companies that rule the market for cloud storage. There’s no historical reason to believe that those same companies will exist 100 years from now. There’s no reason to believe that those companies view their cloud storage operations like a long-term library for future generations. Archives can and do disappear, or become inaccessible. Neely-Cohen writes:

The cloud’s current data center regime is only designed for conditions of utter stability. The physical threats to data centers are not dissimilar to the threats faced by traditional libraries, with a few additions: fire, water, physical destruction, neglect of maintenance, power failures, connection failures, theft, vandalism, and the constant forever need for software that works. During the writing of this piece, in July 2024, a Crowdstrike update bug caused archives that were using Microsoft Azure’s cloud storage services to lose access to their holdings. Natural disasters, wars, and political upheavals are all capable of causing immediate and irrevocable disruptions. … [I]t’s fairly certain any substantive nuclear exchange would render the cloud unusable. Even aside from such nightmare scenarios, the cloud is made possible by a relatively small number of undersea cables that require constant maintenance.  Any blue water naval power already has the firepower and capability to severely damage global access to the internet, and thus the cloud. The global geographic distribution of data centers heavily tilts toward the U.S. and Europe. 
The cloud is fairly centralized, because the companies that run it are fairly centralized.

Cloud storage requires paying someone, an outside entity, for as long as you are engaged in the act of storing. … Amazon S3 has tried to combat this by offering a storage class for slower but more permanent storage, “Glacier,” designed to be competitive with offline cold storage options, by separating storage pricing from retrieval pricing (their “Flexible Retrieval” option is $3.60 per TB as of November 2024). But you still have to pay them. Every month or every year. Forever. You can turn off the machines that you own for a while and then turn them back on, and everything you stored will still be there, but if you stop paying your cloud storage fee the data is gone, probably forever.

Of course, these issues of how information is accessed, consumed, and stored are much larger than my own individual journal, or the journals of the American Economic Association. I don’t think society is going back to paper as a mechanism of information dissemination and long-term storage–and that’s overall a good thing. But in specific contexts, we are very much still working through the habits and practices of interacting with the ever-evolving digital world.

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