In 1997 I attended a session organised of the ASSA at which Wayne Marr explained the new electronic publishing venture ‘Social Science Research Network’, a key progenitor of the unstoppable Open Access movement and of the ‘Open Peer Review’ system pioneered by the World Economic Association. It was clear to me, as a software developer, that this innovation was destined to change the world I wrote two papers about it. The first, also on this site, is a simple description of the presentation. This paper examines the consequences.

It was presented to the 1997 conference on Computer-Aided Learning in Economics (CALECO), and lies buried somewhere in its proceedings.