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Free Downloads of Working Papers from the NBER

Free downloads of working papers from the NBER

In recognition of their substantial support, the NBER offers free downloads of the full text of all NBER working papers since November 1994 to all members of the US Federal Government at the .GOV top level domain, as well as members of the press and to users from most developing countries and transition economies.

No registration or password is required. Users in eligible domains will be offered free downloads when selecting ``PDF'' on the bibliography page of the WP they found using any of the search functions on our web site.

If the PDF button does not appear above the abstract on the bibliographic page for the selected working paper, and you are in a domain eligible for free access, and there is no statement that the paper is not available in full-text form, then the problem is likely to be that our server does not know the origin of your request.

An easy test is to browse http://papers.nber.org/papers/w0000. This is a test document that is available, and if you are in one of the authorized domains you should be offered a free download if you select full-text on the bibliographic page. at the bottom of the page. If you aren't, read on...

Since all we know about any visitor to our web site is a numeric internet address, all authentication is based on that address. We use reverse name lookup to determine if the numeric IP address is in an authorized domain.

You can test your site with the instant reverse name lookup tester. If it shows you only the numeric address of your computer, and not a host name, then you will not be offered free full-text downloads without someone first giving us the range of numeric IP addresses used on your network.

Many sites do not respond to reverse name lookup requests, and we have no way of knowing whether such a site is in a domain eligible for free down-loads. You may, of course, use the order basket feature to purchase single copies online.

If you do not have reverse name lookup, we can mail you a URL for the paper you request. The URL is good for 7 days from anywhere in the world, but we will only mail it to an authorized domain. You can request a URL by selecting on the ``Information for subscribers and others expecting free downloads'' link that appears on each page when IP address authentication fails.

Daniel Feenberg
feenberg of nber dot org

Last modified 27 February 1999