Dynamic papers

Presently, academic papers are fairly static things. The author writes them, works on them for a period of time, in which they may undergo a series of changes, until they get published.

Once a paper is published, it retains the same content indefinitely. Occasionally, reprinted papers might be expanded or might include a series of objections and replies. But this is fairly rare. .

There is a somewhat older tradition in which academic books would change and grow through multiple editions. The changes were never as extreme as, say, the many editions of Leaves of Grass, but authors could flesh out their views in light of new considerations. I am not sure if this was ever really the norm, but it certainly was much more common in the past than it is today. Though authors do often write new papers to update their old ideas, they seldom go back and actually rewrite their old papers.


Why should this be the case?

I take it that there are two primary reasons. First, it doesn't fit in well with print journal culture. An article which is available primarily in printed form must be reprinted if it is to be changed, and that seems to rarely happen, especially to journal articles.

Second, there is something nice about having a static target for other people to cite and discuss. Papers which change might change in ways which make criticisms unwarranted.


Nevertheless, I think that the internet should make new forms of scholarship possible, and one thing that it seems to allow us to do is to make new versions of papers accessible while keeping old versions available as well. This need not be a common thing, but I think it would make sense for at least some papers to continue to be updated after the initial state of publication.

Each paper could be assigned a version number that gets updated, with a list of major changes, on the author's webpage. While this would make it slightly more difficult to keep subsequent discussions of the original paper clear, but it would help to keep scholarship organized (as opposed to series of changes where authors revise and update their old ideas in new papers),and would serve to improve the quality of philosophical literature.