Wider use of working papers has however been hampered by problems of current awareness and the handling costs associated with holding stocks of papers. To realise the vision of a free electronic publishing environment in Economics, we need to take the existing free publication system off the paper cart and put it into an electronic Formula-1 car. There are many reasons why an electronic working paper collection is superior. First, it is less costly to its publisher, because the author supplies the first copy at no cost and the marginal cost of an additional copy is close to zero. Second, if a good current awareness database system for working papers is available it can break the 'insider problem' of papers only circulating among a small group of researchers who thereby gain an advantage.
British research is at a considerable disadvantage.
Third, it allows poor institutions with Internet access to obtain research results at low cost. It received its first contribution in April 1993, and continues to store working papers, though its main activity now is to collect metadata on electronic working papers stored at other institutions. Collecting bibliographic references to documents rather than collecting the documents themselves may seem odd at first, since most pre-print services hold documents and metadata on the same site. It has not been overwhelmingly successful. Other 'local' archives continue to proliferate.