Call for Papers: The Economics of Limited and Open Access Publishing

May 29, 2008

Economic Analysis and Policy (EAP) is a 38 year old journal published by the Economic Society of Australia (Queensland branch) that has just adopted an open access policy. To celebrate this important step, EAP intends to publish in 2009 a special issue on the Economics of publishing, with special reference to different business models, like the commercial, university press, open access and pre-print models. Academic publishing is undergoing a profound transformation that we wish to better understand.

EAP particularly seeks to publish passionate, critical, and controversial articles. It is open to orthodox but also unorthodox approaches.

We expect to publish 5 to 8 articles. They will be peer-reviewed under the guest editorship of Christian Zimmermann (University of Connecticut). Please submit your manuscript in PDF format through the journal’s online submission.

Update: The submission deadline is set for November 1, 2008.

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Posted by Christian Zimmermann

My paper got published, what do I do?

May 20, 2008

A typical situation: An author registered on the RePEc Author Service has a working paper, listed on RePEc in his profile, that got published in a journal. Now that the publisher has provided the bibliographic information about this article to RePEc, the author can add it to his profile. What should he do about the working paper?

In an overwhelming majority of cases, the answer is: nothing! Indeed, most publishers accept that pre-prints, even post-prints, remain on authors´ home pages or institution repositories (what department working paper series are, for example). In case of doubt, see the SHERPA/RoMEO list. Thus, the author should not ask the paper to be removed from wherever it was put up.

Note: removing a paper from an author profile does not remove it from the database. It only makes the system learn that the author is not the author of this particular work. The consequences can be very annoying. For example, it becomes impossible for RePEc to recognize that these are two versions (pre-print and published) of the same work, as they appear to have different authors. Then, someone stumbling on the working paper will not find a link to the published version.

For authors caring about their ranking, there are even more adverse consequences from removing the working paper from the author profile. First, many working paper series have higher impact factors that journals. Second, the authors loose the download statistics of the working paper. Remember, working papers are much more downloaded than articles. And if the article is available only to subscribers, non-subscribers do not have the option of accessing the free working paper version.

And if it is really required that the working paper be removed, ask the RePEc series maintainer to only remove the link to the full text, not the whole record.

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Posted by Christian Zimmermann

A survey of RePEc services

May 11, 2008

RePEc is just a way to organize bibliographic data. A RePEc service uses that data and makes it usable to the public. As the data is in the public domain, anybody can start such a service and make RePEc even more useful. Here is a list of known RePEc services, listed in alphabetical order.

CitEc

CitEc performs citations analysis on works listed in RePEc and returns citation data to RePEc services. CitEc is managed by Jose Manuel Barrueco Cruz and is hosted by the Technical University of Valencia, Spain.

EconLit

EconLit is a bibliographic database sold by the American Economics Association. It also display select working papers series from RePEc. In exchange, Econlit provides some bibliographic metadata to RePEc and support in encouraging more working paper series to be listed in RePEc.

EconPapers

EconPapers displays all the data collected in RePEc, including author information and links to references. The site can be browsed by series, journals, authors and fields. EconPapers also provides various checks to others services and to archive maintainers (metadata syntax, URL checks, linking different versions of the same work). EconPapers is maintained by Sune Karlsson and hosted by the University of Orebrö, Sweden.

IDEAS

IDEAS displays all the data collected in RePEc, including authors information, references, citations, and rankings. The site can be browsed by series, journals, authors, fields, and institutions, or searched. IDEAS is maintained by Christian Zimmermann and hosted at the University of Connecticut, USA.

Inomics

Inomics is a website that was created by the late Thorsten Wichmann. One feature of Inomics is displaying RePEc data. While the rest on the site is continually maintained by Berlecon staff, the RePEc part still runs unmodified after many years. Inomics is based in Berlin, Germany.

LogEc

LogEc performs statistical analysis for downloads and abstract views on select RePEc services (i.e., those that make the effort to provide relevant data): EconPapers, IDEAS, NEP and Socionet. The results can be called in all sorts of ways. LogEc is maintained by Sune Karlsson and hosted by the University of Orebrö, Sweden.

NEP

NEP (New Economics Papers) disseminates new working papers through field specific email lists. At this writing, 83 mailing lists are available, and they typically send a message once a week. To be listed, a working paper needs to be recent, available online, and selected by an editor aided by an expert system. Subscriptions are free. NEP is lead by Marco Novarese, maintained by Thomas Krichel and hosted by SUNY-Oswego, USA.

RePEc Author Service

The RePEc Author Service allow authors to compile all their works listed in RePEc into one folder. Along with contact information and affiliations, the collected data can then be used by other RePEc services, to enrich the displayed data, generate cross-links or compute rankings. The RePEc Author Service is maintained by Christian Zimmermann and hosted by the University of Connecticut, USA.

Socionet

Socionet is a website in Russian that serves a lot of information about research in social sciences, including RePEc data. It also includes RePEc data in Cyrillic that other services typically do not display. Socionet is maintained by Sergei Parinov and Viktor Lyapounov and hosted by the Russian Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk.

Others

RePEc data is also disseminated through an OAI-PMH portal (OAI=Open Archives Initiative) where it is picked up by numerous other services, including OAIster, Google Scholar and Yahoo Search.

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Posted by Christian Zimmermann

RePEc in April 2008

May 2, 2008

As expected RePEc beat traffic records in the past months, with both EconPapers and IDEAS posting records. Over all services, LogEc recorded 749,918 file downloads and 2,815,159 abstract views.

In other news, the RePEc Input Service was inaugurated a few days ago. We also experienced some email trouble as our email server was subject to a denial-of-service (DoS) attack. While the attack is still going on, we have found efficient was to deal with it. Finally, the following institutions joined RePEc with new archives: Academy of Economic Studies (Bucharest), Academia Romana, University of Strathclyde, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Wolters Kluwer Health, Robert Schumann Centre, Institute of Development Studies (Brighton), Lebanese Economic Association, Institute of Labour Law and Industrial Relations in the EC (IAAEG).

And now the various thresholds we passed last month, with plenty of important ones this time:
30,000,000 cumulated downloads
10,000,000 article downloads
700,000 monthly downloads
475,000 online items
175,000 paper abstracts
100,000 papers announced through NEP
16,000 registered authors
2,000 online chapters
1,600 software components

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Posted by Christian Zimmermann