Should-Read: Victor Chernozhukov et al.: Announcement of new Economics (econ) archive

Should-Read: This is coming 20 years after I expected it. And it is, at the moment, confined to econometrics. But very nice to see:

Victor Chernozhukov et al.: Announcement of new Economics (econ) archive: “An Economics section of the scientific repository arXiv is opening this month… https://arxiv.org/help/econ/announcement

…arXiv is internationally acknowledged as a pioneering open access preprint repository. It has transformed the scholarly communication infrastructure of multiple fields of physics and plays an increasingly prominent role in mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, and statistics. arXiv is an essential component of scientific communication for many researchers worldwide in order to rapidly and widely disseminate their findings, establish priority of their discoveries, and seek feedback to help improve their work. It is hosted by the Cornell University Library with additional funding from 220 members libraries and several scientific foundations including the Simons Foundation.

The Economics arXiv will start with a single subject area of Econometrics, but according to demand we expect to add more subject areas in the future, and the Econometrics subject can also be subdivided further. The reason to start with Econometrics is that a significant number of Econometricians already regularly submit their work to the statistics domain of the arXiv. We hope that creating an explicit Econometrics domain will result in a majority of Econometricians to submit their work to the arXiv, so that most of the new papers in the field are disseminated in that way. If that goal is achieved, then regularly checking the Econometrics arXiv will become an efficient and easy way to stay current on the Econometrics literature. We initially want to focus on methodological papers, in agreement with the following description:

econ.EM (econometrics): Econometric Theory, Micro-Econometrics, Macro-Econometrics, Empirical Content of Economic Relations discovered via New Methods, Methodological Aspects of the Application of Statistical Inference to Economic Data
The arXiv allows to upload a new version of a paper anytime, while also maintaining all previous versions. This helps clarify academic priority of ideas, while at the same time always making the latest version of papers available.

Manuscripts can be submitted in different formats. Latex files are preferred, but pdf files printed from a word processor other than TeX or LaTeX are also possible. Before submitting an article one needs to create a user account and in some cases an endorsement from an existing user may be necessary, but this should be unproblematic.

To ensure the success of this project, we encourage you all to submit your current Econometrics working papers to the Econometrics arXiv. The first postings on the new arXiv section will appear on September 26, 2017. The inaugural moderator of econ.EM will be Victor Chernozhukov (MIT).