RePEc has reached over the last week-end a historic mark: one million works in Economics and neighboring sciences are now indexed, of which 87.5% are available for download. The bibliographic database is comprised by 59.2% of journal articles, 38.5% of working papers, 1.3% of book chapters, 0.8% of books, and 0.2% of software components. All this material has been indexed by volunteers maintaining close to 1300 archives. As RePEc bears no costs, all the data is made available for free.
When RePEc started in June 1997, it built on a stock of metadata with 40,000 entries from its precursor NetEc, which started in 1992. Since then, data holdings have increased in an ever increasing fashion:
| Items | Date |
| 100,000 | August 2000 |
| 200,000 | July 2003 |
| 300,000 | January 2005 |
| 400,000 | July 2006 |
| 500,000 | September 2007 |
| 600,000 | June 2008 |
| 700,000 | January 2009 |
| 800,000 | September 2009 |
| 900,000 | April 2010 |
| 1,000,000 | January 2011 |
The data collected by RePEc is used by a large number of free core services, including EconPapers, EconomistsOnline, IDEAS, NEP and Socionet. Other services that use RePEc data, however without reporting back usage statistics include, among others, Econlit, Google Scholar, Inomics, Microsoft Academic Search, and Worldcat.
Posted by Christian Zimmermann 
The RePEc Blog 