Tribute from Thomas Krichel
I learned today of the passing of Jan Weiland, on 27 September 2026, at the age of 56. Jan was the manager of EconStor at the Zentralbibiliothek Wirtschaftswissenschaften (ZBW) in Kiel, Germany. My first interaction with him dates to June 2006. This was at the time the late Bob Parks gave up on EconWPA. We looked for a successor. Munich University library were the first to accept and MPRA was created. We had to tell ZBW that this opportunity was gone. ZBW did not take it personnally. They have continued to contribute to RePEc. They were the first to fund a server for us. They still do. Jan acted as point of contact for that. Anytime the server had issues, he took my excessive technical details with great cheer. Jan was leading the growth of ZBW repository EconStor. EconStor exports its data to RePEc. It absorbed a few RePEc archives located in Germany. Over the years, we talked a few times. He was easy to arrange a call with. He was very welcoming, cheerful and a rather humble. It will not be easy for ZBW to replace him with a kinder person.
Tribute from Christian Zimmermann
The open access community in Economics lost an important advocate and doer in Jan Weiland. He was instrumental in the creation and maintenance of EconStor, which has become the gateway to the dissemination of research through RePEc for many institutions and individuals, in Germany and elsewhere. EconStor is now among the major RePEc archives, and the second largest completely open access one.
Jan was totally committed to the cause of open access. I ran into him a few times, in Kiel, Berlin and even St. Louis, where we chatted about the big picture of open access and the nitty gritty details of doing it right. It will be difficult to find such a devoted advocate.
Posted by Christian Zimmermann 
