The RePEc Blog

This guest post was written by Jan Weiland.

EconStor is a subject-based repository for economics and business administration maintained by the German National Library of Economics / Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (ZBW). It provides free access to all kinds of scholarly publications, including working and discussion papers, conference papers, journal articles, research reports, and dissertations. The main content so far comes from German research institutions and university departments. But acting as a disciplinary repository EconStor, of course, welcomes any research institution worldwide seeking for a reliable storage and publishing infrastructure for its research papers in the field of economics and business administration – especially those institutions without access to a local repository infrastructure.

EconStor’s main objectives are

• to offer scholarly publications without access restrictions (‘Open Access’),
  
• to assure free and durable accessibility via fixed and stable links (‘Persistent Identifier’),
  
• to provide consistent bibliographic data (‘Metadata’) like author, title, abstract, keywords, and JEL codes, and
  to disseminate the publications via databases, search engines and social media.

In order to achieve these goals we decided to make a “Full-Service Offer” to the editors of publications being considered to be published at EconStor, i.e. the EconStor team organizes the full text upload and metadata recording – free of charge, but based on a publication agreement [pdf] which is required for copyright reasons.

Besides complete working paper series or e-journals, EconStor is also open for single authors wishing to self-archive their own publications like pre- and post-prints, research reports, or theses. For this purpose we have prepared the ‘special community’ EconStor Direct, separated into collections covering common document types.

For the dissemination of scholarly output in economics, RePEc is an ideal service. Therefore we started in 2006 with feeding publications from our repository
into the RePEc database. Further requests followed from other institutions, so by and by the idea was developing to build up a national RePEc input service – similar to DEGREE for the Netherlands or S-WoPEc for Scandinavia. And although some institutions from Germany already were (and still are) providing its research series to RePEc themselves, there was still enough demand for setting up such a national service. But at that time at first a more flexible repository system had to be implemented. ZBW decided for DSpace, still the most widely-used repository software in the world. What were the reasons that led to this decision? First of all DSpace offers an interface for bulk ingest. This is very helpful when some metadata is already available in a structured format, like Excel or CSV files, e.g. from conference management tools. Furthermore it is able to handle Unicode/ UTF-8 encoding (very important for non-Latin characters, e.g. Cyrillic), it uses the Handle System from CNRI as persistent identifier system by default, and its inherent community&collections structure fits best to our needs: covering series, journals, and conference proceedings. So it is no surprise that AgEcon Search, a very similar approach in agricultural economics, uses the same software!

The idea of building up a ‘national RePEc input service’ was convincing for the German Research Foundation (DFG), that decided to supply some extra funding for the implementation in 2009. The funding enabled us to transfer the RePEc export interface to DSpace and to prepare additional publications for the integration into EconStor. This includes several ‘back files’ from the early 1990s, which in some cases had been originally published in formats like Postscript, DVI/TeX, or pure HTML – and are now available in PDF on EconStor and in RePEc.

In the meantime EconStor is hosting the full texts of more than 100 ‘series’ (including conferences and journals) from 75 German research institutions and university departments in RePEc. And with more than 7,500 downloadable items EconStor is now a major contributor to RePEc. The demand shows, that the ‘RePEc input service’ constitutes an important incentive for an institution to participate in EconStor.

But also publications from single authors are provided to RePEc, e.g. doctoral theses are listed within ZBW’s series ‘EconStor Theses‘. And as ‘theses’ are tagged as ‘books’ within this series, those documents will be displayed correspondingly within a personal RePEc author profile. So if you wish to add your PhD thesis to your RePEc profile, listed separately from your papers and articles (see example), you are very welcome to submit your work to EconStor!

Although RePEc is a very important dissemination point for EconStor content, there are some more distribution channels making it potentially interesting to participate in EconStor: All records are fed into EconBiz (ZBW’s search engine for economics and business studies), Google Scholar, BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) and OAIster. A certain portion of content from EconStor is provided to Economists Online and the Social Science Research Network (SSRN).