The big news for RePEc this month is the inauguration of a new RePEc service, EconomistsOnline, provided by Nereus who also contributes a major new archive of working papers to RePEc.

In terms of traffic, we counted 760,521 file downloads and 2,629,780 abstract views during the month. RePEc has welcomed 9 new archives: CASE (Poland), Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz, NEREUS, Universidade de Concepción, RSconsult, FrancoAngeli Editore, INFER, Agency for Economic Analysis and Forecasting (Bulgaria), Technological Educational Institute of Kavala

And finally, the thresholds reached during the month:

120,000,000 cumulated working paper abstract views
850,000 items listed
400,000 working paper announcements sent through NEP
333,333 working papers listed
275,000 working papers online
250,000 working paper abstracts
120,000 working papers with citations
4,000 series and journals listed

[By Dave Puplett]

Economists Online is a new service that provides easy and open access to high-quality multilingual academic output in a single, cross-searchable portal. Economists Online contains research drawn from both the repositories of the project members and from the well established RePEc database.

The launch will be marked at the “Subject Repositories: European collaboration in the international context“conference in London on 28/29th January. Professor Nicholas Barr from The London School of Economics, who will be speaking at the conference, describes Economists Online as “A wonderful treasure trove of easy-to-find resources, all the more because so many can be downloaded directly”.

The Economists Online portal offers a search engine with a multilingual interface that can find both citations and full-text of a wide range of research, including articles, working papers, conference materials and datasets. In addition, the portal provides services such as RSS feeds, author profiles and publication lists. Abstract views and downloads through this portal are integrated into the statistics RePEc provides to users.

Economists Online was established by members of the Nereus Consortium, which consists of prestigious academic economic institutions in Europe and other leading Economics research institutes. Nereus is also providing full access to economic research from about 20 European institutions, both through Economists Online and RePEc.

RePEc is allowing free access to its services, to readers, authors and publishers. Why? Because we want that research be disseminated the most widely possible and in the most democratic way possible. Everyone should have the same chance at getting read, no matter where the author is located. And everybody should be able to access research, no matter what the means and the location.

Of course, we cannot make research completely free, as some publishers keep their material gated. But whenever possible, we offer alternative, open access versions to gated material. Those versions may not be the latest ones, but they are usually close enough and usable by readers.

But how can we make all those services available for free? For one, we have volunteers who are willing to devote some of their spare time for the cause. Also, the running of RePEc is decentralized to the furthest extend possible. For example, the actual indexing is done by the publishers (following these instructions). As they are the ones who benefit the most from being listed, they are willing to comply with our requirements. Thus the data input is costless to RePEc, and then the collected data is made available to those who would like to build a service with it. Again, volunteers create and manage these services at no cost to RePEc.

The statistics compiled by RePEc are used for various rankings, for example for authors. While we still consider these statistics to be experimental, in particular those pertaining to citations, these numbers are increasingly used for evaluation purposes. We value the privacy of authors and only disclose the statistics for the top ranked ones. Authors get each month a link to their statistics, a link with a code valid only for a month. This avoids a link that may have been disclosed once to be visible forever.

We get more a more requests from department heads to obtain the data for members of their department. Our typical response is to have them ask directly the members of their department to forward them their monthly RePEc emails. But of course, we could also provide directly all the relevant information. The purpose of this poll is to see whether participants in RePEc would favor such a disclosure. The conditions would be:

1. The request must come directly from the head of the relevant department, by email to Christian Zimmermann
   
2. The request contains a link allowing to verify that this person is indeed head.
   
3. Statistics would be disclosed only for the members of the department who are currently affiliated with the department, as indicated in their RePEc profiles.
   
4. Those with invalid email addresses would be excluded from the analysis, under the presumption that their affiliation may not be current.
   
5. The department head would be provided with a link containing the analysis, a link that expires with the next monthly update of the rankings.
   
6. The department head needs to be a registered author.
   
7. A department would receive at most one disclosure a year.
   
8. We reserve the right to refuse disclosing statistics.
   
9. By department, we mean any unit with a separate entry in EDIRC.
   

And another year came to a close, with RePEc celebrating 1/8 of a century since its founding. But let us first have a look at we was done in the last month. We welcomed 8 new archives: Colegio de economistas de A Coruna, Universidad de Oviedo, Revista de Economia Aplicada, National University of Ireland, Galway, Certified General Accountants Association of Canada, George Zane Institute for Economic and Social Research, China Agricultural University, Basque Centre for Climate Change. Despite this relatively small number of newcomers, over 11,000 new works were added, bringing up the number of listed full texts to over 700,000. Traffic was also high for December, with 714,638 file downloads and 2,519,682 abstract views.

As for 2009, what have we achieved? 150 new archives, 142,000 newly listed works (+21%), of which 133,000 are available online (+23%), 4,000 new registered authors (+22%). I would argue this is tremendous growth for a project that is already 12.5 years old. We started a research blogging initiative, introduced a Facebook application. We counted 9,540,461 downloads and 34,024,922 abstract views.

And let me conclude with the thresholds attained during the last month:
1,000,000 chapter abstract views
700,000 listed full texts
275,000 cited items
200,000 cumulative book downloads
5,000 listed books

The December 2009 statistics, as well as a look back at 2009, will be posted a few days late, as we are attending the ASSA meeting in Atlanta. Stop by at our booth in the exhibitors hall to say hello and discuss about RePEc.

NB: the monthly emails to authors, editors and series maintainers will also be delayed by a few days.

RePEc allows very rapid dissemination of research. Once a paper or article has been indexed, it is available within 24 hours on EconPapers and IDEAS, and for working papers, disseminated within a week or two through NEP. But this rapid diffusion is only going to happen if the works get indexed on time in the first place. For this, over 1000 archive maintainers are in charge.

On a regular basis, we get enquiries from authors complaining that their works are not showing up and that we should do something about it. Or spider their homepage. This is not how RePEc works. Authors need to contact the respective archive maintainers to keeps listings current. Contact email addresses are provided on EconPapers and IDEAS in the series descriptions. Indeed, the respective publishers have sole authority on their listings. The same applies for any corrections to existing listings.

We also get requests from authors to correct something in their profile, like an affiliation or the listing of works. Again, authors can and should do this themselves by logging into their account at the RePEc Author Service. The only exceptions: the author has lost the password and cannot retrieve anymore emails at the address listed in the account, or the coordinates of a listed affiliation have changed. In both cases, email the RePEc Author Service administrator.

And of course, if something does not seem right, tell us. But the RePEc team has little time to address individual issues. With about 300 new works indexed a day and close to 23000 registered authors, it is simply impossible. Remember, we all do this on our spare time. You can help make RePEc better.

When I started studying economics in the ’sixties, there was no Xerox. Journals were printed, and then mailed. Because printing (type-setting by hand, no computer at that time) was expensive, only selected articles were distributed through journals, and journal editors had to select carefully. Researchers and even students subscribed to journals in order to have articles of interest available; otherwise they had to copy them by hand, or excerpt them, or go to the library to have a look. Distribution by print was the cheapest and most economic way of distributing research.

Hence the journals had a dual function: 1.) They selected research articles and 2.) they distributed them. The first function (selection) was necessary because printing–especially printing of mathematical formulae–was quite expensive. So the bundling of selection and distribution had an economic reason.

This reason has vanished. It is possible to distribute practically for free (through MPRA for instance). So the question is: Do we need journals, simply for the purpose of selecting articles, as the function of distributing articles is redundant nowadays. Let me share some thoughts on the issue. I concentrate on research journals, whether open access or not. Survey journals like the Journal of Economic Perspectives or commentary journals like Economists’ Voice are another matter.

Do We Need Quality Stamps?

Some people argue that journals provide a “quality stamp” for scientific contributions, just like rating agencies assess firms or assets. We know that rating agencies may induce unwarranted herding effects, yet the point that journals perform a rating function is true. But is it needed? And if needed, can’t it be provided more cheaply?

As to whether a quality stamp is needed: This may be different for different groups of users. So look at different groups that may benefit from a quality stamp.

Researchers

In my fields of research, I certainly do not use journal names for selecting articles. I search the Web and have my subscription to NEP. Most articles (99%) in top-ranking journals are of no concern to me because they discuss issues I don’t work on and seem too specialized, technical and boring as to make it worthwhile to read more than the abstract. But I get the abstract much earlier through NEP and other services. And further, I obtain the articles I am really interested in much earlier (one or two years earlier) over the net than through the journals. (Note that the articles in good journals are typically available on the Net at the time of publication.) If I find an article on the net that I like, typically a pre-print, and see it later published in a good journal, I feel a kind of satisfaction about the journal, but this does not seem to justify the existence of journals.

Further, I am not interested in seeing only the good papers that some referees approve of. As I know my field, I do not think that referees know better. Actually many papers in top journals are not so good, and mediocre journals publish excellent papers. Further, many rejected papers are rejected for reasons such as being badly written, ill organized, or employing faulty reasoning, but they often do contain useful references and interesting ideas, and therefore they interest me as much as a superbly crafted paper elaborating on rather sterile detail.

Yet there may be the benefit coming with having an article revised during the refereeing process. The probability that the mathematics are correct is slightly increased. Typically, the exposition is improved, too. Further, the references are enlarged by adding some quite relevant stuff, but also by adding things suggested by the referees for sundry reasons that hurt overall consistency. But this does not hurt much.

The benefits going with having an article refereed carry side-effects, however: Sometimes the editors’ and referees’ demands make papers worse. In the same vein, have a look at Bruno Frey’s amusing paper, and especially at what he reports about Robert Frank.

Regarding the publishing of my own research I see that publishing in a journal does not affect citations, but making a paper available on the net does so. Hence journal publication is of very limited value to me (but I don’t have to care about the journals I am publishing in because I am close to retirement).

So, overall, I think that researchers do not benefit significantly from journals that publish research papers.

Hiring Committees

A benefit from having quality stamps is that this helps hiring committees to select candidates under conditions of ignorance. This may be true, but I would consider this a dysfunction: In the first place, hiring committees should comprise knowledgeable members; otherwise you would not need hiring committees and leave the decision to bureaucrats; and second, citation numbers are much better indicators for the impact of an author’s work than the journals the author has published in. So ignorant hiring committees may better resort to RePEc citation scores, rather than being enthused by journal titles. (But then they will end up with hiring candidates who work in fields many people work in. So they end up with conventional candidates, rather than creative ones. But this will be the case whenever you have incompetent hiring committees.) In any case, hiring committees won’t need journals, as RePEc citation scores are independent of journal names and do not rely on the existence of journals.

However, the reliance of hiring committees on journal rankings may entail strictly negative consequences. I read, for instance, that Notre Dame University intends to dissolve the department of economic history because the economic historians do not publish in mainstream journals.

It seems to me that hiring committees do not benefit from the existence of journals either.

Libraries

It is sometimes said that journals permit journal rankings, and this is a help for librarians for deciding which journal to subscribe to. This is, of course, not an argument for supporting journals. Without journals, there would be no problem of selecting journals, and the librarians could concentrate on selecting books.

So I conclude that libraries would perform better if we had no journals.

Economics Without Journals

Imagine we had no economics journals. What would happen? Presumably people would write more books. I would consider this an advantage, as knowledge is much too fragmented at the moment. Further, institutions would be in demand to channel the flow of information better than possible through journals, such as blogs specializing on some topic or another, and meta-blogs like Econ Academics. I could imagine that collections of papers on certain topics would emerge. The Special Issues feature of the economics E-journal provides an example.

A Suggestion for a Next Step

My impression is that the existence of journals is a feature of the past. Journals will die, and this will be an improvement for academic economics. The process will be sped up if new ways of channeling information are devised. So here is just one idea:

I could think, for RePEc, to devise a feature that lists related papers to any given paper. Google Scholar has a feature like that, but I think that could be improved tremendously for our specific purposes. An easy way would be to look at the citations of any given paper and give all papers with similar citations. This could, theoretically, be achieved by building on the citation data created by the CitEc project. If someone with programming expertise could adopt such a project, this would be a great help for economists world-wide. (As a side effect, such a feature would put pressure on Elsevier to release its citation data.)

There are certainly many more suggestions. I am looking forward to see them, perhaps in comments to this blog. And certainly my general point must be controversial. I must have overlooked some important aspects. The world can not be as inefficient as I portray it. Otherwise we would have no journals right now.

Maybe we can have an exchange of ideas.

With a little delay, here is the monthly report about what is happening at RePEc. First, the CitEc project, which does citation analysis for RePEc is now being hosted by the Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas, who took over from the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia. Second, we welcome 10 new participating archives: Academia Sinica, Purdue University (II), GRIPS, COMISEF, University of Münster, Institute of Education (University of London), Public Finance=Finances publiques, University of Alicante, Spiru Haret University (III), and University of Pau. Third, we experienced record traffic, with 918,278 file downloads and 3,324,205 abstract views.

Finally, regarding the thresholds we passed in November:
450000 listed abstracts
150000 cited articles
22000 registered authors

And to anyone going to the ASSA meetings in Atlanta, we hope to see you at our booth in the exhibition hall!

Due to electrical work at the computer center of Orebrö University where the Econpapers and LogEc web sites are hosted, there will be a delay in computation and display of monthly RePEc traffic statistics. As a consequence, the monthly mailing to registered authors, to editors and the RePEc archive and series maintainers will be delayed a few days as well. The web sites will continue to be in operation as a static copy will be hosted for a few days elsewhere.