We inaugurate today the RePEc Input Service. As we detailed recently, bibliographic data is made available to RePEc on the publishers’ own ftp or web servers. Unfortunately, this is not possible in some cases, either because of web publishing policies or for technical reasons (in many cases forbidding the serving of files with an .rdf extension).
The RePEc Input Service is meant to be a service of last resort. Indeed, the principle of RePEc is that publishers are in charge of the maintenance of their own bibliographic metadata. This new service violates this in the sense that a RePEc volunteer has to maintain and host it. At this point, it can host only data about working paper series, but other document types are planned.
The scripts for the RePEc Input Service were written by Sune Karlsson. It is hosted by Christian Zimmermann at the University of Connecticut.
The RePEc Blog 