RePEc is proud to announce that it will soon take over the management of Google Scholar. Indeed, Google is dropping Google Scholar from its portfolio of web services following its yearly Spring cleaning exercise. While Google Scholar is using relatively few resources, it is not bringing any revenue and there is no expectation that it ever will. This situation is not much different from RePEc, which has no revenue either and has learned to work efficiently with volunteer resources and some sponsored hardware. For a company that is accountable to shareholders, Google and its parent Alphabet find it more and more difficult to justify giving away resources. However, this is at the core of the mission of RePEc, bringing free bibliographic resources to the academic community.
While RePEc has a lot of experience, after all it is older than Google, the take over is not without challenges. Indeed, RePEc has concentrated on Economics while Google Scholar expanded into all sciences. Thus the amount of data is much larger. Initially, services will continue to run on Google hardware before eventually moving to be independent from their birth parent. As usual, RePEc will rely on volunteers and is now appealing for them to come forward. Talent is needed in system administration, programming, UX, and brain storming. Experience in the academic publishing industry or academia a plus, especially in marine biology. Motivated candidates are asked to make themselves known by email.
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