How to become an 800 pound
gorilla: the case of RePEc.
Thomas Krichel
2008–10–29
structure
Qiping Zhang gave me the following
structure
1.what is the project
2.some history / time line
3.impact on community
4.how does it change the relationship
between fee base and non-fee based
information
What is it? Part 1
open library
• RePEc an open digital library for
economics.
• An Open Library is loosely defined an
application of the OSS principles to digital
libraries. More on this at
http://openlib.org/home/krichel/papers/kuy
us.html, forthcoming ASIS&T bulletin.
• Looking at RePEc will fix ideas.
history
RePEc pre-history
• It started with me as a research assistant
an in the Economics Department of
Loughborough University of Technology in
1990.
• a predecessor of the Internet allowed me
to download free software without effort
• but academic papers had to be gathered in
a painful way
CoREJ
• published by HMSO
– Photocopied lists of contents tables recently
published economics journal received at the
Department of Trade and Industry
– Typed list of the recently received working
papers received by the University of Warwick
library
• The latter was the more interesting.
working papers
• early accounts of research findings
• published by economics departments
– in universities
– in research centers
– in some government offices
– in multinational administrations
• disseminated through exchange
agreements
• important because of 4 year publishing
delay
1991-1992
• I planned to circulate the Warwick working
paper list over listserv lists
• I argued it would be good for them
– increase incentives to contribute
– increase revenue for ILL
• After many trials, Warwick refused.
• During the end of that time, I was offered a
lectureship, and decided to get working on
my own collection.
1993: BibEc and WoPEc
• Fethy Mili of Université de Montréal had a
good collection of papers and gave me his
data.
• I put his bibliographic data on a gopher
and called the service "BibEc"
• I also gathered the first ever online
electronic working papers on a gopher and
called the service "WoPEc".
WoPEc to RePEc
• WoPEc was a catalog record collection. It
remained largest web access point
• Getting contributions was tough, but I
finally got two-way cooperation from a
Dutch consortium
• I prepared a scalable architecture for
building a collaborative digital library.
RePEc protocols
• In 1996 I wrote basic architecture for
RePEc.
– ReDIF
– Guildford Protocol
• The may now be used in a collection for
statistics papers.
1997: RePEc principle
• Many archives
– archives offer metadata about digital objects
(mainly working papers & journal articles)
• One database
– The data from all archives forms one single
logical database
• Many services
– users can access the data through many service
– providers of archives offer their data to all
services
What is it? Part 2
RePEc is based on 900+
archives
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
WoPEc
EconWPA
DEGREE
S-WoPEc
NBER
CEPR
Blackwell
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
US Fed in Print
IMF
OECD
MIT
University of Surrey
CO PAH
Elsevier
to form a 630k item dataset
254,000
370,000
1,600
4,200
17,600
10,800
working papers
journal articles
software components
book and chapter listings
author records
institutional contact listings
RePEc is used in many services
• RePEc Author Servic
• EconPapers
• NEP: New Economics
Papers
• Google Scholar
• RePEc Author Service
• Twitter bulk posting (planned)
•
•
•
•
•
•
IDEAS
RuPEc
EDIRC
LogEc
CitEc
MPRA
… describes documents
Template-Type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0
Title: Dynamic Aspect of Growth and Fiscal Policy
Author-Name: Thomas Krichel
Author-Person: RePEc:per:1965-0605:thomas_krichel
Author-Email: [email protected]
Author-Name: Paul Levine
Author-Email: [email protected]
Author-WorkPlace-Name: University of Surrey
Classification-JEL: C61; E21; E23; E62; O41
File-URL: ftp://www.econ.surrey.ac.uk/
pub/RePEc/sur/surrec/surrec9601.pdf
File-Format: application/pdf
Creation-Date: 199603
Revision-Date: 199711
Handle: RePEc:sur:surrec:9601
… describes persons (RAS)
template-type: ReDIF-Person 1.0
name-full: MANKIW, N. GREGORY
name-last: MANKIW
name-first: N. GREGORY
handle: RePEc:per:1984-06-16:N__GREGORY_MANKIW
email: [email protected]
homepage:http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/
mankiw/mankiw.html
workplace-institution: RePEc:edi:deharus
workplace-institution: RePEc:edi:nberrus
Author-Article: RePEc:aea:aecrev:v:76:y:1986:i:4:p:676-91
Author-Article: RePEc:aea:aecrev:v:77:y:1987:i:3:p:358-74
Author-Article: RePEc:aea:aecrev:v:78:y:1988:i:2:p:173-77
….
… describes institutions
Template-Type: ReDIF-Institution 1.0
Primary-Name: University of Surrey
Primary-Location: Guildford
Secondary-Name: Department of Economics
Secondary-Phone: (01483) 259380
Secondary-Email: [email protected]
Secondary-Fax: (01483) 259548
Secondary-Postal: Guildford, Surrey GU2 5XH
Secondary-Homepage:
http://www.econ.surrey.ac.uk/
Handle: RePEc:edi:desuruk
Lessons to be
learned
keys to success I
• Have an extraordinary individual to start
things up. That person has to have
– extraordinary vision
– excellent programming and computer system
administration skills
– be ready to take high risks to her career
• Such individuals are rare. That's why there
are no similar systems in other areas.
key to success II
•
•
•
•
Have a small group of volunteers
Have your own servers
Disseminate as widely as possible
Demonstrate to authors and institutions
that it works for them.
– institutional registration
– author registration
institutional registration
• It started by one sad geezer making a list
of departments that have a web site.
• I persuaded him that his data would be
more widely used if integrated into the
RePEc database.
• Now he is a happy geezer and one of our
three crucial volunteers.
RePEc author service
• RePEc document data has author names
as strings.
• The authors register with RAS to list
contact details and identify the papers they
wrote.
• This is classic access control, but done by
the authors.
author registration
• It started when funding allowed us to hire a
crazy programmer to write an author
registration system.
• The system went online as "HoPEc" in late
2000.
• It has been renamed "RePEc author
service" (RAS)
• A recent grant from OSI allows for a
rewrite and expansion.
LogEc
• It is a service by Sune Karlsson that tracks
usage of items in the RePEc database
– abstract views
– downloads
• There is mail that is sent by Christian
Zimmermann to
– archive maintainers
– RAS registrants
that contains a monthly usage summary.
authors' incentives
• Authors perceive the registration as a way
to achieve common advertising for their
papers.
• Author records are used to aggregate
usage logs across RePEc user services
for all papers of an author.
• Stimulates a "I am bigger than you are"
mentality. Size matters!
summary: keys to success
• Have a small group of volunteers
• Disseminate as widely as possible
• Demonstrate to authors and institutions
that it works for them.
– institutional registration
– author registration
KEY idea 1
• RePEc attracts a community of users and
contributors
• The community itself is the focus of
attention
• RePEc describes the living rather than the
dead.
• Forget about documents!
KEY idea 2
•
•
•
•
Forget about users!
Disseminate widely
Users will come through Google anyway.
And Google loves RePEc services
– puts RePEc services top when the query
consists of the name of an author
obstacles to open libraries
•
•
•
•
•
lack of imagination & entrepreneurship
inability to form alliances
user-centered thinking
document-centered thinking
technical competence required
– OAI PMH
– XML and XML Schema
– Unicode
• the "C" word
impact on
community
measurement problems
• We do have some measures of impact of
individual services.
• We have some measures of global
derobotified web impact through LogEc.
• But the denominator of total community
size remains an unknown.
• There would be room for a 3rd PhD thesis
on RePEc here.
author registration success
• The main target group are the authors.
• There are is an independent list of 1000 top
authors. At this time, 79% of top authors
are registered.
http://ideas.repec.org/coupe.html
• To register, authors must have a fairly good
understanding of RePEc. They understand
that the registration process is not for users.
the anecdotal monster
• Christian Zimmermann and I attended a
meeting at the Federal Reserve Bank of
NY.
• We were shown RAS+LogEc+CitEc figures
of individuals in various salary groups,
calculated for a promotion review
committee meeting.
• FRB of NY are not the only one.
in the works
• We can do work on filtering departments
into subject specialization areas
– papers are classified by NEP reports.
– authors claim the papers
– authors say where they work
• We can advise students on where currently
research in a certain area is being
conducted.
Impact on fee vs
free services
nothing much in theory
• RePEc is a library. It documents both feebased and free resources.
• Working papers have in principle been free,
even in the paper area.
• Over time, the publication delay has
become so long that published papers are
useless as a source of information about
the state of the art.
• They serve archiving and author vanity.
in practice a lot
• RePEc has provided economists with a
more efficient way to circulate working
papers.
• Working papers become increasingly cited
and used.
• RePEc has preserved the working paper
culture. In computer science, where there
has been no RePEc, working papers have
disappeared.
remaining nuisance
• The remaining obstacle to open access are
libraries.
• As long as libraries are ready to purchase
the output of toll-gated publishers, some
will produce it. That's simple economics.
• Libraries hold back progress in scholarly
communication.
collaboration is welcome!
http://openlib.org/home/krichel
Thank you for your attention!