[open-economics] works of Economics in Public Domain

Fri Jan 4 14:36:42 UTC 2013

On 04/01/2013 13:45, Guo Xu wrote:
> This sounds great --
>
> The problem I guess with econ is that it's - when excluding the more
> philosophical earlier contributions - a fairly young discipline. As
> far as I know, the Journal of Political Economy for example, is one of
> the oldest journals and started only 1892.
>

Speaking as a historian - he says, getting on to his high horse! - it's 
dangerous to start drawing lines about what is and what isn't economics, 
and especially to do so from the perspective of the present. Without the 
earlier philosophy, could there be the modern, more technical economics? 
And note that the Journal of Political Economy is using an older 
construct - *Political* Economy - in its title, rather than the modern 
term *economics.*

That said, there is the problem of copyright, meaning that any 
collection of texts we make is going to be restricted to authors 
deceased by 1925 (or thereabouts - the situation varies for different 
countries) and will therefore not be representative of the whole 
discipline, especially its modern manifestations.

I also think that there is an increase in academic production over time; 
more works, and certainly more organizations and journals, the closer 
you get to the present day. Not only does the copyright problem hide 
this, but it also makes listing all the works individually on a google 
spreadsheet an endless task. But to be selective is to introduce bias.

Journals are a particular problem - I think publishing a collection of 
articles by different authors on a regular basis in a serial is a real 
revolution in the production of knowledge, and needs to be considered 
very differently to the books and pamphlets that predominated up until 
the late c19th. (Of course, books are still published, and they can be 
very influential.)

That said, at least journals are, by their very nature, collected 
together and come with ample metadata 'built in'; far easier to get when 
compared to gathering up disparate authors and texts published all over 
the place, as I fear we might be doing with the google spreadsheet.

I think the best hope we have with journals, where they are in 
copyright, is to pressure the publishers for access to datamining, even 
if we can't get the texts outright.

> Would those journal articles also enter the public domain when death +
> 70 years apply?
>

I don't know the answer to this; does anyone else on the list know?

John

> Guo
>
> On 4 January 2013 14:24, John Levin <john at anterotesis.com> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Okay, I've taken the plunge, and started a google spreadsheet to list open
>> economics texts, along the lines of that started by Open Philosophy:
>> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ah5rUXTj4nHcdElMN25kMHQ1T0NyRlUzT01hb2VPRWc
>>
>> (open phil doc at:
>> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ams8fpz2_77XdHNMeVB4SGsxMi1nQUFneHFKX2l4T2c&hl=en_GB#gid=0
>> )
>>
>> I've put some entries in, but just as samples really. Please jump in and add
>> what you can.
>>
>> Hopefully, when the spreadsheet has been populated, we can look at doing
>> something similar to Open Philosophy with the texts.
>>
>> John
>>
>>
>> On 04/01/2013 11:01, Jonathan Gray wrote:
>>>
>>> There have been numerous threads on which authors' works enter the
>>> public domain in 2013 on our pd-discuss mailing list [1]. Presumably
>>> economics authors would be a subset of this.
>>>
>>> It depends on which jurisdiction you're in, but if you're in a country
>>> where death + 70 years applies, you could try looking for economists
>>> that died in 1942 on DBpedia.
>>>
>>> Would be curious to hear how you get on!
>>>
>>> All the best,
>>>
>>> Jonathan
>>>
>>> [1] E.g. see:
>>> http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/pd-discuss/2013-January/date.html and
>>> http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/pd-discuss/2012-December/date.html
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 2:09 PM, John Levin <john at anterotesis.com
>>> <mailto:john at anterotesis.com>> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>      On 02/01/2013 12:36, Jia Lyng wrote:
>>>       > Hi everybody, Happy New Year!
>>>       > And Happy 2013 Public Domain new additions!
>>>       >
>>>       > I just got an inquiry from my other Econ networks, asking about
>>>      authors
>>>       > and works of economics accessible as public domain. Do you have
>>>      such a
>>>       > database?
>>>       >
>>>       > All best wishes,
>>>       > jia
>>>       > --
>>>       > Berlin Chapter
>>>       > Young Scholars Initiative
>>>       > Institute for New Economic Thinking
>>>       > +49 (0) 157 887 44 884 <tel:%2B49%20%280%29%20157%20887%2044%20884>
>>>       > twitter: @YSIBerlin
>>>       >
>>>
>>>      Compiling (and mining) such a list is something I have wanted to do
>>>      for a while. As far as I know, although there are many digitizations
>>>      freely available on the net (eg on archive.org <http://archive.org>
>>>      & google books), there isn't actually a database of them.
>>>
>>>      I'm waiting to see how open philosophy http://openphilosophy.org/
>>>      and textus http://textusproject.org/ work; they could be the example
>>>      to follow.
>>>
>>>      Although, of course, if there's sufficient interest now, I'd be very
>>>      happy to work on such a project immediately.
>>>
>>>      John

-- 
John Levin
http://www.anterotesis.com
http://twitter.com/anterotesis