License and Copyright
There is no license agreement required for the NBER online service, however the working papers themselves are protected by copyright.
Authors of NBER Working Papers hold respective copyrights, not the NBER. Users may download, view and print papers for their personal use, or to give to their colleagues or students, to place in the subscriber's library collection, or in a university vended or sponsored course pack. Short extracts, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted provided that clear attribution to the paper is given. Subscribers may download any or all papers for archival storage, with subsequent use constrained to fair use as noted above during the subscription term and thereafter. Requests for permissions beyond fair use should be made to the author(s). Current author contact information can often be obtained from their profiles. A full listing of NBER affiliates' and their profiles is available.
Abstracts may be copied into printed or electronic bibliographic aids without permission, provided attribution is given.
Students and employees of a subscriber's network may download NBER Working Papers via a proxy or other devices under the subscriber's control, regardless of the user's actual physical location. Walk-ins and other users must be physically present at the subscriber's location.
Subscribers have access to all public NBER Working Papers for the duration of their subscription and may retain copies of papers acquired during the term of their subscription after that subscription lapses, with no obligation to erase or destroy anything after the subscription has expired.
Voluntary Product Accessibility Statement
In conjunction with its digital accessibility audit and ongoing efforts, the NBER has prepared a Voluntary Product Accessibility Report.
Archives
There is no present plan to remove papers from the website on the basis of age, however from time to time papers have been replaced or removed at the request of authors. Any subscriber storing papers for later retrieval should have a mechanism in place for detecting revisions so that readers are provided with current versions. The LOCKSS system has permission to collect, preserve, and serve this Archival Unit.
Robots and Screen-Scrapers
The following are the only interfaces suggested for robotic access to the working papers:
http://www.nber.org/papers/CNNNN
http://www.nber.org/papers/CNNNN.pdf
where C is one of W, T, or H and NNNN is a 4 or 5 digit working paper number. Any user implementing a robotic access mechanism is requested to discuss its action with me. These URLs may also be used for links from reading lists to particular papers. From time to time individual paper requests may be satisfied with temporary links. Please do not incorporate temporary links into long-lived pages, use the interface described here instead.
Libraries wishing to place links to our site in their online access systems may use the URLs above, and also
http://www.nber.org
http://www.nber.org/papers
Note that since our search engine is freely available, "federated search" vendors do not need special permission to access our site.
Cataloging
Working papers are issued in one of three series, Historical, Technical or General, and the leading letter in the paper designation is H, T or W according to the series. So w0001 is the first paper in the general series.
We understand that the general working paper series has been assigned the ISSN 0898-2937. The ISSN 1073-2489 appears to refer to the Historical Working Papers.
Abstracts and other bibliographic information may be copied into printed or electronic bibliographic aids without special permission, provided clear attribution is given.
A machine readable version of our bibliographic database (including the text of abstracts) is available in RePEc format at http://www.nber.org/RePEc/nbr/. Documentation for that format is available at http://ideas.repec.org/stepbystep.html. Virtually all economics working papers from all institutions world-wide are available in that format. You are free to incorporate information from the database into your online bibliographic system.
There is an RIS format bibliography appropriate for Endnote at wwpinfo/all_nber_working_papers.ris
Unlike RIS we have no master BibTeX file. The only way to get a .bib file for a WP is
www.nber.org/papers/w12345.bib
A bibliographic file in XML format is also available from:
http://www.nber.org/wwpinfo/googleXML_h.xml (Historical papers: ~150k)
http://www.nber.org/wwpinfo/googleXML_t.xml (Technical Working papers: ~300k)
http://www.nber.org/wwpinfo/googleXML_w.xml (Working papers, main series: BIG: >60MB)
See the XML header for any of these pages for more information on the NLM Journal standard which Google Scholar prefers.
MARC
In 2020, we followed recommendations from OCLC to separate MARC records for print hardcopy working papers from the MARC records for the online versions.
A MARC record for the electronic version of any working paper is available at:
http://www.nber.org/papers/wNNNN.marc
and for the hardcopy version at:
http://www.nber.org/papers/wNNNN.marc?hardcopy=1
and the entire collection at
http://www.nber.org/wwpinfo/marc/all_nber_working_papers.marc
http://www.nber.org/wwpinfo/marc/all_nber_working_papers_hardcopy.marc
sorted in reverse order of distribution date. Also, recent working papers are available in monthly files in the directory
http://www.nber.org/wwpinfo/marc/
However, subject headings are JEL rather than Library of Congress. We are interested in following up suggestions for obtaining LCSHs.
http://www.nber.org/wp_metadata
Authorization and Limits
We authorize subscribers by IP address range and/or domain name. For single subscribers login/password authorization is available, however we never provide that in addition to address or domain name authorization. An alternative using email address allows all users with email addresses in the subscribers domain to receive full text, regardless of their network location.
Library Logos and Download Statistics
If you wish the library logo to be displayed on the bibliographic page (so that your users are aware that the library is paying for their access) please send subs@nber.org a URL for the logo and we will add it to bibliographic pages served to your site. A gif file 80 pixels wide by 15-20 pixels high is most appropriate but the browser will accommodate any reasonable size. This logo will be incorporated by reference, and will load from your site each time one of your users is shown an abstract.
The series "NBER Working Papers" incorporates the separately numbered series "Development of the American Economy" and "NBER Technical Working Papers" in our search facility and for purposes of serials cataloging.
A page with your subscriber information (company name, contact, expiration date, etc) is always available at http://www.nber.org/subscriber_info.pl. This page is dynamically generated depending upon the IP address of of the requesting site. Statistical usage information can be added to that page if you email a request to subs@nber.org.
EzProxy Configuration
Babson College reports that the following configuration of Ezproxy works well for them:
## NBER.org
T National Bureau of Economic Research
U http://papers.nber.org/
H papers.nber.org
H m.nber.org
D nber.org
H wwwdev.nber.org
Option Cookie
SUSHI and EzProxy Stanzas
Further Assistance
Please direct questions about authentication to subs@nber.org.