The future of scholarly communication in Economics Thomas Krichel work partly sponsored by the Joint Information Systems Committee through its Electronic Libraries Programme

Disclaimer All I am saying today is a personal opinion. It does not reflect the official policy of the groups that I am associated with. These slides may not be distributed without my prior authorisation.

1997: The birth of RePEc Founding fathers: the BibEc and WoPEc projects, DEGREE, S-WoPEc two initial drafts by Thomas Krichel were revised at a meeting in Guildford in May 1997 –ReDIF, a metadata format –The Guildford protocol, a convention how to store ReDIF on ftp or http servers

The RePEc 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 120+ 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

My vision of RePEc It is a collaborative effort of community wide-knowledge sharing. RePEc promotes free exchange of data between academics. It fights the division of the world in information-rich and information-poor. It should work to end the commercial costly commercial intermediation between academics

Faustian Bargain Scholars produce work for free. Scholars review for free. Scholars buy back their own work from the publishers Academics pay twice! but this system is under attack from two forces

Destroyer 1: Serial cost spiral Decline in personal subscriptions, libraries are the single customer group. Library spending has little increase. Price rise for library prices. Libraries cancel titles. Publishers raise prices further.

Bergstroms proposal Do no longer review for journal that have a high cost Great echo within the profession, support from –Robert Ashenfelter, Larry Kotlikoff, Gareth Miles, Martin Osborne, Ariel Rubinstein Ted will be working on a list of journal most likely to have monopolistic pricing in the summer. He will maintain a public list of supporters.

Destroyer 2: Peer review delay Now common that it takes about four years to get a paper published. Material that is formally published is already way out of date, museum value. Crucial need for a fast filter (FF).

FF1: NEP: New Economics Papers Founded 1998 by Thomas Krichel Set of about 40 reports on recent additions to RePEc Editors receive a full list of new additions to RePEc and make a choice about what papers to include in the report. first step towards peer review using RePEc

The future is yours: more fast filters First mover advantage is important –old universities are the most famous –old journals are most famous Need to know the latest literature anyway Important value of peer recognition by operating the filter

FF2: The Surweb site Site that lists interesting work in a certain area using some structure. It make a short comment on that work. May be maintained jointly with a NEP report –list older issues of a report –further selection of items –inclusion of comments to describe technical essence

FF3: The review site Form a small editorial team –draw up a set of public guidelines –communicate decisions as a community Authors submit papers –require deposit in a RePEc archive –author chooses to put paper publicly visible or not 1 before 1 rule –before a paper may be reviewed, all of its authors must review the paper of another author

There should be two reports by paper, otherwise editorial team has to help out. Editorial team edits a final report out of the two reports –Public element with emphasis on current state of the paper and its relations to other papers –Private element with emphasis on helping authors to improve paper Author may choose to –publish the paper with the public report attached –withdraw/resubmit the paper

Review site ethics Do not say that you are competing with journals, rather say that you are making papers fitter for subsequent review in journals. Never say that your service is free, free means bad to many economists. Base your work with RePEc –gives some credibility. –help on technical matters –more fun

Conclusion When a technological shock (like the Internet) hits a social structure (like the scholarly communication system), then there is an opportunity for new entrants to come along. This opportunity is here today. Seize it.