NEP now sponsored by Penn State

August 26, 2012

Since 2005 one of the main RePEc computers, the one handling New Economic Papers (NEP) has been housed at the State University of New York at Oswego. NEP handles the weekly email notifications of new working papers in about 90 field-specific reports. As part of its academic mission, SUNY Oswego kindly let the RePEc project place the machine on its network in one of its server rooms. While Bill Goffe was the local sponsor, the vast majority of the effort of running it fell to Thomas Krichel.

Bill has now taken a job with Penn State and this server hast just moved with him. Bill and the entire RePEc team would like to thank SUNY Oswego for its support over the last seven years and it looks forward to working the Information Technology in Liberal Arts group at Penn State for hosting this machine for the foreseeable future.

Leave a Comment » | Dissemination of research in Economics, RePEc volunteers, Workings of RePEc | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

OpenID authentication through RePEc

August 21, 2012

It is now possible to use RePEc Author Service credentials to log into some other websites using the OpenID schema. This means that users do not need to use separate user names and passwords for those websites.

OpenID uses a user’s web page to establish credentials, as long as the website participates in OpenID. The RePEc Author Service now does so, with the drawback that few users know their profile URL (for example: http://authors.repec.org/pro/pzi1/). For this reason, services using OpenID credentials through RePEc will typically request the user’s RePEc short-ID (for example: pzi1). The latter can be found on an author’s profile on EconPapers or IDEAS, or by using a RePEc short-ID lookup tool.

A typical authentication procedure goes as follows:

  1. The user is asked for a personal RePEc short-ID at a referring service.
  2. The service forwards this information to the RePEc Author Service, which shows the habitual log-in page.
  3. The user enters the usual RePEc Author Service credentials (email address and password).
  4. Upon success, the RePEc Author Service asks for confirmation that log-in should proceed at the referring service.
  5. Upon confirmation, the referring service obtains confirmation from the RePEc Author Service that this is the person with this short-ID.

Steps 2 and 5 are bypassed if the user has a live RePEc Author Service session. It should be noted that the RePEc Author Service does not communicate the email address or the password, only that the owner of the short-ID (and its corresponding web page) is indeed this person. The referring service is then free to use the short-ID in its own authentication.

Note that some people will not be able to use this authentication service right away. Indeed, their RePEc Author Service profile needs to be enabled for this. This is not the case for anybody who has not logged in the RePEc Author Service since late June 2012.

OpenID authentication through RePEc is currently in use for the maintenance of reading lists and publication compilations on IDEAS, as well as for the RePEc plagiarism committee. Other services that require authentication, tied to RePEc or not, will soon follow.

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Posted by Christian Zimmermann

RePEc in July 2012

August 3, 2012

One project that makes particular strides lately is CitEc, our citation analysis initiative. Thanks to the collaboration of several publishers, references from articles are now being added at a substantial pace, and the citation coverage is now becoming more respectable. There is a lot of material in the pipeline, and we hope that other commercial publishers will join in this effort. Also, NEP is moving to a new location and will be off-line a few days. This blog will report on both over the coming weeks.

We counted 504,492 file downloads and 1,823,518 abstract views in July 2012, as always contingent to the pruning performed by the LogEc project. Our new participating archives for the month of July: Ottawa United Learning Academy, Nottingham Trent University (II), University of Central Florida, Europa Grande, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (II), Vistula University, Universidad de Montevideo, University of Antwerp (II), Mathematica Policy Research, Singapore Management University, Lahore School of Economics, Universidad de Oviedo.

And finally a few thresholds we recently passed:
100000000 article abstract views
12000000 cumulative downloads through EconPapers
1100000 items available online
800000 items with abstracts
750000 links to research in registered author profiles
400000 articles with abstracts
333333 JEL coded items

Leave a Comment » | Workings of RePEc | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann