Annotating papers in PDF files

June 25, 2016

The SocioRePEc.org research information system provides free added-value services for RePEc users, including a new tool to annotate RePEc papers in PDF. SocioRePEc also gives enrichment facilities for RePEc authors and some additional daily updated statistics.

Compare with other RePEc services like IDEAS, etc., SocioRePEc currently supports some new use cases:

  1. You can select interesting fragments within PDF papers and store them with your comments as your micro research outputs. You can keep them for your private use only. If you share them publicly, readers of the papers will see them as annotations to papers’ text. See more in the instructions.
    Other RePEc services can freely take the public annotation data from SocioRePEc.
    We continue further development of this tool to enable fragmentation and re-use of research outputs in PDF in new ways [1].
  2. The enrichment facilities allow you to create research relationships between the fragments of papers, annotations, etc. See instruction.We provide an initial taxonomy of the research relationships [2] and continue its development.
  3. The new statistical service gives daily updated pictures of the “production”, the “popularity” and the “usage” activities behind changes of the RePEc data. See more here.
    In particular, an author can see at the personal profile page (example) their the most popular papers for the specified period of time (example), different classes of scientific relationships with their papers (example), and some other statistics.
    Research organisations, for instance, can see at the profile page (example) their the most popular papers by collections (example) or by researchers from its staff (example), scientific relationships, and some other statistics, e.g. with total numbers of their papers by collections and by researchers, etc.We are developing this statistical service to be a “signalling system” for RePEc users [3].

By developing SocioRePEc, the SocioRePEc team proposes to the RePEc community a testbed for experiments with new forms of re-using research papers, with ability to express research relationships between papers, with new ways for scholarly communication [1,2] and with the statistical signalling system [3].

We believe this SocioRePEc approach and technology can bring a new level of transparency in research and can lead to improvements in the scientific standards of rigour and integrity.

The SocioRePEc team invites individuals and organisations to collaboration.

At the moment the project has no funding. We are looking for funding sources and/or a cooperation with other projects. If you can help, please let me know at sparinov@gmail.com.

Please consider making a donation. If you like to be a sponsor of this project, please let us know at admin@sociorepec.org.

[1] SocioRePEc CRIS with an interactive mode of the research outputs usage, (direct link to PDF)

[2] Scholarly Communication in a Semantically Enrichable Research Information System with Embedded Taxonomy of Scientific Relationships, http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-24543-0_7, (direct link to PDF)

[3] Semantic Linkages in Research Information Systems as a New Data Source for Scientometric Studies, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-013-1108-3, (direct link to PDF)

Leave a Comment » | Use of RePEc data, Workings of RePEc | Permalink
Posted by Sergey Parinov

Quality control committee: looking for volunteer

June 13, 2016

The RePEc community is looking for a volunteer to head a committee on quality control for journals admitted to be indexed in RePEc. Here is some background.

There is a growing number of journal-like outlets that pretend to be normal open access journals. But in reality, all they do is take authors’ money, and put the content up on a web site. They do no quality  control. They have no editorial board that does any work. In fact, many times people on the board do not even know that they are on it.

Traditionally, RePEc has not done any quality control prior to listing additional journals. We believe that quality can best be assessed by users of the RePEc dataset. However, we have been criticized for helping these deceitful outlets gain a mantle of respectability through their RePEc listing. Therefore we take this step forward. We expect quality control also to be an issue with toll-gated journals.

The volunteer we are looking for will determine the exact name of the committee and its remit. (S)he would recruit a few committee members. (S)he would run the mailing list and maintain some web pages for the committee. RePEc can provide both. Anybody who is interested in this work should contact repec@repec.org.

We expect that this will not be a lot of work. We are sure that this as a duty that any academic can itemize as a professional service on their CV.

2 Comments | Dissemination of research in Economics, RePEc policy discussion, RePEc volunteers, Temporary RePEc announcements, Workings of RePEc | Permalink
Posted by Thomas Krichel

RePEc in May 2016

June 4, 2016

In light of the recent purchase of a major open access provider by a commercial publisher, we want to emphasize that RePEc is independent and cannot be bought. More details are on our blog post. Note that there is a free host for open access papers in Economics that indexes its contents in RePEc: MPRA.

In May, we welcomed the following institutions that now maintain a RePEc archive: OSIPTEL, Technical University of Cluj Napoca, Times Research Consultant, Shiga University, Scienpress, Asociación Española de Economía Laboral, World Trade Institute, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (II). We counted 507,966 file downloads and 2,235,733 abstract views. And we reached the following milestones:

200,000,000 cumulative abstracts views on reporting RePEc services
90,000,000 cumulative downloads from reporting RePEc services
2,000,000 cumulative abstract views on Socionet
30,000 books
4,000 Twitter followers for NEP reports
3,000 books with references
300 authors in the directory of economists on Twitter

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