RePEc: An Open Library for Economics Thomas Krichel Work partly supported by the Joint Information Systems Committee of the UK Higher Education Founding Councils

Bringing scholarly communication in Economics kicking and screaming into the Internet age: NetEc, RePEc and more to come Thomas Krichel work partly sponsored by the Joint Information Systems Committee through its Electronic Libraries Programme

Electronic scholarly communication A substantial part of the Summer School has been concerned with the implication of securing access to toll-gated resources at a time when the toll seems to be ever increasing. The bulk of the problem are the serials Death spiral of serials –Dividends must rise –Sales stagnates –Publishers sell less at higher prices

Faustian grip Authors write papers for free Authors review papers for free All high-reputation channels are controlled by toll-gating publishers Libraries are paying a rent to the publishers Commercial publishers have a grip on academia Krichel knows the way out

Reforming scholarly communication Scholarly communication is about –dissemination –quality certification splitting both is a key part in reform set up alternative dissemination channels

Scholarly dissemination Toll-gated papers are not in the authors interest. Toll-gated papers are not in the readers interest. Need to get authors and readers closer together, cut out the middle (wo)man. Authors and readers form a discipline, thus a discipline-based approach is needed (cf Stern)

Scholarly communication in Economics Economics is highly peer-reviewed with long delays Need for informal dissemination channels Working Paper tradition Initial motivation of RePEc is to organize working paper dissemination of the Internet.

RePEc Past & Present February 1993: Krichel puts first electronic research paper in Economics on a gopher server as part of the NetEc project May 1997: RePEc was founded Now: RePEc largest distributed library of free scientific documents on this planet No current funding Spanking new homepage

RePEc searches a middle way.. arXiv.org –centralised –high requirements on contributors web –decentralised – low requirements on contributors

... via a three-layer model Many archives One database Many services –many user interfaces –providers of archives offer their data to all interfaces at the same time.

RePEc is based on many archives WoPEc EconWPA DEGREE S-WoPEc NBER CEPR US Fed in Print IMF OECD MIT University of Surrey CO PAH

RePEc is used in many services BibEc and WoPEc Decomate Z39.50 service NEP: New Economics Papers Inomics IDEAS RuPEc EDIRC HoPEc

… describes documents Template-Type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0 Title: Dynamic Aspect of Growth and Fiscal Policy Author-Name: Thomas Krichel Author-Person: RePEc:per: :thomas_krichel Author- Author-Name: Paul Levine Author- Author-WorkPlace-Name: University of Surrey Classification-JEL: C61; E21; E23; E62; O41 File-URL: ftp:// pub/RePEc/sur/surrec/surrec9601.pdf File-Format: application/pdf Creation-Date: Revision-Date: Handle: RePEc:sur:surrec:9601

… describes persons (HoPEc) Template-Type: ReDIF-Person 1.0 Name-Full: KRICHEL, THOMAS Name-First: THOMAS Name-Last: KRICHEL Postal: 1 Martyr Court 10 Martyr Road Guildford GU1 4LF England Homepage: Workplace-Institution: RePEc:edi:desuruk Author-Paper: RePEc:sur:surrec:9801 Author-Paper: RePEc:sur:surrec:9601 Author-Paper: RePEc:rpc:rdfdoc:concepts Author-Paper: RePEc:rpc:rdfdoc:ReDIF Handle: RePEc:per: :THOMAS_KRICHEL

… describes institutions (EDIRC) Template-Type: ReDIF-Institution 1.0 Primary-Name: University of Surrey Primary-Location: Guildford Secondary-Name: Department of Economics Secondary-Phone: (01483) Secondary- Secondary-Fax: (01483) Secondary-Postal: Guildford, Surrey GU2 5XH Secondary-Homepage: Handle: RePEc:edi:desuruk

The RePEc vision It is a collaborative effort of community wide knowledge sharing by discipline champions, publishers and librarians. Once a critical mass of data and user services is reached outsiders face strong incentives to contribute. The relational features allow to share the burden of cataloguing and reduce the cost of keeping the collection up-to-date.

RePEc is an Open Library Distinction between provision and implementation of data since 1997 Open for provision and open for use Methods and software are reusable in other disciplines because all disciplines have some form of free channel Librarypower is required to catalogue the web papers

What about peer review Most documents in RePEc have some form of peer-review before appearing there Publishers do not peer review, the management function that they subsidize could easily be done by academics It is possible to absorb the costs of running journals into general university costs

WebScreen Project for Yarus middle way between full formal and informal peer-review Authors submit RePEc free papers to a channel Have to review somebody elses paper before your own paper may be reviewed WebScreen list papers as long as they are free

Conclusion: four wishes from the library community Lobby against copyright transfers Lobby for open system (JSTOR) Support the chaotic movement towards web publication Learn from the Open Source community to build open libraries

Live happily thereafter ! Amen