2017 was a special year for RePEc for two major reasons: First, we celebrate the 20 years of RePEc serving the economics community, second we held a rare meeting of the major volunteers involved in the project. This face-to-face meeting allowed to discussed quite a few issues and in particular has set the direction for the next years. We are preparing ourselves to be even more open about what we do so that more people can participate and help with the initiative. For example, we have opened our major internal mailing lists, we created a wiki, a GitHub account and a Twitter feed, and are encouraging a new generation to step up to make sure RePEc can be there for another 20 years. There is still a lot of work to document and open all we do. We hope those who a local for opportunities to volunteer watch over our shoulders and raise their hands when they feel they can contribute.
What else happened? Of course, we had a large number of new institutions and publishers joining RePEc, 70 of them. They helped in adding over 300,000 pieces of research indexed in RePEc. CitEc, our citation extraction project, processed over 120,000 documents, finding over 4 million references of which 1.6 million were matched with items in RePEc. We surpassed 2.5 millions indexed items, 50,000 registered authors, facilitated 6 million document downloads (only counting reporting RePEc services), and sent 4,000 NEP reports announcing over 40,000 new working papers. This is actually just skimming the services we provide to the profession, check the RePEc home page for all we do.
Posted by Christian Zimmermann 
The RePEc Blog 