1. my life and times Thomas Krichel LIU & НГУ 2008-07-09

2. 1965 to 1993 Made in Saarland, a border region in Germany close to France. Studied Economics and Social Sciences at the Universities of Toulouse, Paris, Exeter and Leicester. Always been a bit of a geek.

3. 1993 to 2000 Lecturer in economics at the University of Surrey. Finished a PhD in economics. Started to work on my main claim to fame, the RePEc project, a digital library for economics

4. 2001 to now (assistant, then associate) Professor in the Palmer School of Library and Information Science in the College of Information and Computer Science at the CW Post Campus of Long Island University. My teaching mainly in web design because students can't go further without it.

5. free academic publishing I make a contribution to making scientific writings freely available on the Internet. But there has to be some organization to the free availability. This organization should also be free. This is mainly what I am working on. RePEc remains my most important creation.

6. RePEc It is a distributed system. It belongs to nobody. It's data is all freely available. It has no formal organization. It receives no external financial support. It appeared impossible to do when I started it.

7. RePEc is large There are close 900 archive that contribute data. They describe 400k documents. Authors and institutional are registered. Users choose between competing interfaces. A PhD is being written about it.

8. current work I develop a registry of institutions http://ariw.org. I am working on author registration at http://authorclaim.org. Both are supposed to cover all academic endeavors and be freely available. When both projects are finished I will die.

9. link to Siberia Since 1997 Сергей И Паринов, then of СО РАН, imitated my work in his project RuPEc. I visited him in 1998 and 2001. Since 2003 I have been spending summers in Novosibirsk. Since 2005, I have a contract with НГУ.

10. http://openlib.org/home/krichel Thank you for your attention!