With the recent addition of an archive at the University of Berne (Switzerland), RePEc reached a major milestone with 2000 contributing archives opened since inception in 1997. Indeed, publishers index their content in RePEc by opening a so-called RePEc archive, which is located on a server they manage and that contains all the metadata necessary for their publications to be visible on the various RePEc services. This means that RePEc is not a web spider: publishers submit their publications to RePEc.
RePEc archives come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Some are managed by the major commercial publishers. Others are maintained by small research centers striving to get their output known to the world. Some use dedicated servers, others place their RePEc archive as part of their website. There are also some aggregators that relay the metadata from several institutions or publishers.
All in all, over 2.6 million items of research are indexed from over 8,000 serials, including over 3,000 journals. To see the current list of RePEc archives, click here, and to find instructions to open a RePEc archive, click here.
The RePEc Blog 