A proposed RePEc fantasy league

August 22, 2013

Back on the 1st of April (Fool’s Day) of this year, I introduced the RePEc fantasy league. While this post was to be more on the humorous side, many people took it seriously. And interest for the league is unabated, with several people recently asking about it. So I guess there is sufficient demand, and it looks like it could be fun to play with economists. Hence, I want to make a proposal, ask for comments, and let people vote whether such a fantasy league should be run.

Here is the proposal. As the publishing output of economists is rather slow-moving and there is no defined season for play, the league is set up for continuous entry and play is on an infinite horizon. A set of rules has been drafted, and I welcome comments about them, especially from those who are more used to play in this kind of league.

For those who are worried that they could be virtually subject to trades, there would be the ability to opt out from being played with.

Beyond fine-tuning rules, there is also the question whether such a league should be run at all. Below is a poll that will be open for a month. Feel free to vote.

7 Comments | RePEc features, Use of RePEc data | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

Openness of Economic Data and Code

August 9, 2013

The publication of an article or a working paper is only part of the scientific process. Scrutiny by the scientific community during the peer-review process and later through replication attempts and extensions of the original work should be part of it. Unfortunately, very little of that is happening in economics. Indeed, a significant hurdle is that very often the computer code and/or the data used for the analysis are not disseminated. While some journals now make this a requirement for publication, there is otherwise very little incentive for researchers to make this available. In part, this is also a question of culture, as we are not used to cite datasets, for example, and prefer to acknowledge their use in a footnote.

To change this culture and push for making code and data more readily available, the Open Knowledge Foundation and put together a set of Principles on Open Economics. Read them and sign on if you think you are willing to endorse them.

On the RePEc front, we are working to get datasets indexed as well. If interested in participating in this, contact me.

Leave a Comment » | Open Archives | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

RePEc in July 2013

August 4, 2013

Some news from NEP: There is a new report, NEP-NPS (Nonprofit and Public Sectors), and a new NEP blog, NEP-ARA (Economics of the Arab World). The NEREUS project announced that is will be closing the Economists Online RePEc service at the end of the year. There are a few newly participating RePEc archives: ToKnowPress, Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, Universitatea Creştină “Dimitrie Cantemir”, Oklahoma State University, Akadémiai Kiadó, Sciences Po. But despite this small crop, a lot of new material was added to RePEc, 6600 papers and 10500 articles. We counted 470,265 file downloads and 1,939,170 abstract views last month.

The thresholds we reached:
5000000 matched citations
300000 cited articles
3000 indexed software components
400 RePEc-wide H-index

2 Comments | Workings of RePEc | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann