Just in time for Open Access Week: 1 million Economics working papers indexed in RePEc

October 22, 2020

As we celebrate the yearly Open Access Week, we are proud to announce that RePEc now indexes over one million working papers, as pre-prints are typically called in Economics. Working papers have long been at the heart of economic research, and RePEc has been there from its start to help with their dissemination.

The theme of the Open Access Week this year is “Open with Purpose: Taking Action to Build Structural Equity and Inclusion.” This theme resonates strongly with RePEc. Indeed, our mission is to enhance for everyone the dissemination of economic research. RePEc was created specifically to help those who were outside the informal dissemination networks for working papers and allow them to follow the research frontier. Indeed, as publication delays from submission to print take years, the working paper is the best informer of current research. Before RePEc, one needed to be “within the club” to be even aware of new papers, let alone have access to them. With RePEc, anybody can find them and in most cases also read them, years before they get published in a journal.

The current Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the need to rapid access to ungated research for everyone. While this has been a problem in other fields, this has not been the case in Economics. At the time of this writing, over 6000 works are available through RePEc, and almost all can be downloaded for free.

Equity and inclusion are thus about giving the same chance at reading and getting read. All services are free and open to every one. Authors get their institution to participate and index their research output, for free (instructions). If the institution is unwilling to do so, authors can upload their papers, for example at MPRA, again for free. Readers can leverage the various RePEc services to discover new research (and older, too), for free. The metadata is even relayed to other popular indexing services, you guessed it, for free (even if some of them do require a subscription). But beyond being free, it is important to note that no one will be rejected, as long as their writing is about economics and is academic research. And everybody can access the papers.

We are happy to see that authors from the Southern Hemisphere are increasingly submitting the papers to RePEc. As RePEc was built specifically for those who not have the privilege to work or study in the top universities, we are particularly proud at seeing the increasing share of readers from Southern countries, too. In total the traffic we see splits in the following way: Asia 35%, Europe 24%, North America 19%, Africa 10%, South and Central America 9%, Oceania 3%. We saw users from every country over the last year.

While the penetration of open access journals is likely lower in economics compared to other fields, we have with our working paper culture a powerful substitute. Even after a paper has been published in a journal, we observe that the working paper version is read many times more that the article. While a journal publication may still bring some prestige, getting read (and ultimately cited) requires a working paper. The publication process in a journal is littered with hurdles that may be to high for some,and thus some good research may not get visible that way. But working papers give everyone a fair chance.

Leave a Comment » | Dissemination of research in Economics, Open Archives, Use of RePEc data | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

RePEc can help you with working off-campus

August 31, 2020

Now that in many universities classes are starting again, and in many cases this is happening through online courses, we thought it would be useful to show how RePEc can help. Of course, as RePEc is an open bibliography, this will be mostly about its bibliographic features.

As you provide readings or reading lists to your students, keep in mind that their access to the reading material may not be the same as when they were on campus. This matters particularly when they try to reach gated journal articles (and some of the few gated working paper series). Instead of giving your students links to the articles on the publishers’ websites, consider rather given them a link of the same article on EconPapers or IDEAS. Why? First, RePEc makes an effort to provide alternative, non-gated versions of the articles, typically as working papers, which can be accessed no matter where your students are. Second, RePEc provides more context to facilitate the exploration of the literature, such as links to references and citations, author profiles, etc.

RePEc makes it even possible for you to maintain online bibliographies that you can share. There are two options: If you want to share your reading list with everyone (and get a link to your reading list from the listed items), create it with this tool on IDEAS, which also lists the reading lists that have already been compiled. If you want to keep the reading list just for your students, you can create a bibliography folder with MyIDEAS, make it public and share a link with your students. Building your bibliography is easy: log in, navigate IDEAS, click on the “Save…” icon above the title of a paper or article, and once done assign the relevant items to a folder you can choose to make public.

Depending on your curriculum, you may want to add material related to Covid-19. At the time of this writing, there are over 4000 papers on the topic indexed in RePEc. To help you navigate this, use the RePEc Biblio, in particular the topic on economics of pandemics and more specifically on Covid-19.

Finally, with no workshops, seminars or conferences on location for the foreseeable future, much of this activity as moved online. To find what is scheduled, or to advertise your activities, check out the Economics Virtual Seminar Calendar.

And if you have suggestions on how we can further help, do not hesitate to contact us!

Leave a Comment » | Bibliographic features in RePEc, Dissemination of research in Economics, RePEc features | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

New: A calendar of virtual seminars in Economics

April 16, 2020

With much of academia and most policy institutions working from home, seminars and workshops have moved online in the same way that teaching has gone virtual. Online seminars have the potential to broaden the public but have so far few ways to make their calendar known. RePEc is here to help with a new service: the Economics Virtual Seminar Calendar.

This calendar is based on user submissions and is updated regularly. As submissions accumulate, it will be subdivided by fields. Users can thus regularly visit the calendar to choose their viewings. MyIDEAS also allows to subscribe to seminar announcements by fields and users will receive an email every Sunday with the seminars of the following week.

We hope this service will prove useful to the profession.

Leave a Comment » | Dissemination of research in Economics | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

How RePEc can help you in times of upheaval, and how you can help RePEc

March 31, 2020

The academic, business and policy worlds currently through quite a bit of upheaval as people work from home, classes have moved on-line or have been canceled. People have to adapt to working differently. In various ways RePEc can help.


Bibliographic tools available off-campus

EconPapers and IDEAS are bibliographic websites for Economics that are accessible from anywhere. No need to be on campus or connecting through VPN to access a proprietary bibliographic tool.

Links to open versions of gated articles

Similarly to the above, if you cannot access some articles behind a publisher’s pay-gate, IDEAS often offers you another version in the form of an open-access working paper. Relevant links are on the articles pages on EconPapers and IDEAS.

Covid-19 related material updated daily

Material on RePEc is updated daily with feeds from over 2000 publishers. You can find material about Covid-19 easily by searching EconPapers and IDEAS. For example, this search on IDEAS gives you all the listed material, sorted by most recently indexed. The match count increases hourly.

Get rapid dissemination of Covid-19 related material

You did a study and want it rapidly disseminated? If your institution has its publications already indexed in RePEc, you are fine. If not, you can upload your study at MPRA for rapid dissemination through the various RePEc services, including NEP.

Find topical material about pandemics

The RePEc Biblio has curated listings of the most relevant works in various fields, including a topic on the Economics of pandemics and its sub-topics.

The current situation may also imply that some people have more time than usual, or have a need for some distractions. This may be a good opportunity to help RePEc in various ways. Some opportunities are below.


  • Offer to create a RePEc Biblio topic in your area of specialization

  • Contribute information about your students, advisors, and former students in your graduate program to the RePEc Genealogy. Note that the collected information is used for the ranking of graduate programs, so in a way you are helping yourself.

  • Take a moment to check that your RePEc Author Service profile is still current, in particular that there are no works waiting to be claimed, contact details are OK (many personal homepages are not), and that affiliations are fine. And if you not yet have a profile, create one!

  • Correct broken links in the directory of economic institutions, EDIRC. They are all marked with a red broken chain link.

  • We lost contact with some of our registered authors. Give use their new email address! They are listed with a red question mark on IDEAS and EDIRC, or all together here. If they have unfortunately died, we want to record that, too!

Leave a Comment » | Bibliographic features in RePEc, Dissemination of research in Economics, RePEc features, RePEc volunteers, Use of RePEc data | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

NEP: The working paper dissemination service of RePEc

March 1, 2020

The central mission of RePEc is to enhance the dissemination of research in Economics. Various RePEc services take this to heart in various ways, and today we have a look at NEP (New Economics Papers). This service disseminates new working papers through email, RSS feeds and Twitter. As everything in RePEc this is a free service run by volunteers that currently manages about 80,000 email subscriptions, 20,000 Twitter followers and an unknown number of RSS subscribers.

NEP has currently close to 100 email lists, each handling new papers for a particular sub-field of Economics. Every week, the volunteer editors receive a list of about 1000 new working papers ordered by relevance by an expert system following editors’ past choices. Editors then look over this list and select the working papers that they deem most relevant to their field. They are then sent to subscribers. Only working papers are considered. Indeed, they are at the frontier of research and thus can be considered new research. Publications in journals may lag by several years and are thus not considered.

The classification of new research by NEP field is also used to categorize researchers for various purposes, including rankings (economists and their institutions) and research on the Economics profession.

NEP is open to the creation of new reports and encourages volunteer editors to step forward and contact Marco Novarese, Università del Piemonte Orientale in Italy. Technical aspects of NEP are managed by Thomas Krichel. Hosting for NEP is sponsored by the School of Economics and Finance of Massey University in New Zealand. Development is funded by small and infrequent advertisements on the NEP emails.

Leave a Comment » | Bibliographic features in RePEc, Dissemination of research in Economics | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

3 million items indexed in RePEc

December 12, 2019

A few day ago, RePEc reached a major milestone by indexing over 3 million research items: journal articles, working papers (pre-prints), books, book chapters, and software components. The graph below, taken from the LogEc website and not yet featuring the December 2019 numbers, shows the evolution of the RePEc index since its start in 1997 (click on it to view a larger image).

This graph shows that RePEc content continues to grow relentlessly. With all major publishers participating in RePEc by now, the growth now comes much less from new archives but rather from the continuous growth within the over 2000 participating RePEc archives featuring over 5000 working paper series, 3500 journals, and more. As economists would say, we have shifted from the extensive margin to the intensive margin, which can explain a slight decrease in the growth rate over the last few years.

The first statistics at the end of January 1998 indicate an index with 51,984 entries. The first million was reached in January 2011, the second in December 2017, and the third now in December 2019. Only two years for the last million!

If your publishers or your local academic or policy institution still does not participate in RePEc, it can join by following these instructions, or you can upload your works as an individual contributor at MPRA.

Leave a Comment » | Bibliographic features in RePEc, Dissemination of research in Economics | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

How RePEc helps with Open Access in Economics

October 24, 2019

From 21 to 27 October 2019, the Open Access Week is raising awareness about free access to scholarly research. This year’s theme is “Open for Whom? Equity in Open Knowledge,” which fits nicely in the mission of RePEc. Indeed, the goal of RePEc is to enhance the dissemination of research in the field of economics, in particular through the democratization of access to economic research both for the authors and the readers. The core aspect of RePEc is an open bibliography that allows various “RePEc services” to leverage the metadata about publication in various ways, such as email lists, search engines, organized listings, and more. For an overview of some of the services, see the RePEc home page.

RePEc facilitates open access is several ways. First, all publishers are on equal footing in terms of getting their publication material indexed in RePEc. It is upon them to follow the instructions and maintain their holdings. Second, the metadata makes the distinction between gated and free access, which some RePEc services exploit in the display of the research. For example, on EconPapers, information about download restrictions is listed next to the download link. In the absence of such language, it is assumed that the article is openly accessible (click on images to see them better):

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Note in the first case a prompt to search for other (open) versions, more on this later. On IDEAS, similar language is present in case of gated access:

In addition, the listing of articles on IDEAS for a journal also displays an icon about the download status. In this case, within the same issue of a journal, the first article is open, the second gated, and the third not available online.

Open access penetration in economics journals is comparatively low, though. Indeed, there is likely less need for open access due to a large number of pre-prints, called working papers or discussion papers in economics. In fact, RePEc and it predecessor projects were launched precisely to disseminate working papers, and over 900,000 of them are currently indexed. Working papers are typically in open access, with few exceptions, and it is then not surprising that when both working paper and article versions are available, the working paper is downloaded many more times.

Matching different versions of the same work is a difficult undertaking, especially as many different works have the same title. We leverage the fact that about half the indexed works are written by someone registered in the RePEc Author Service. Then if the same author has several works with a very similar title, we deem them to be different versions of the same research. And if the title changed, authors can add a link using this form.

This information in then leveraged on RePEc services. For example, on EconPapers, the working paper versions are listed right under the download link of the article (and vice-versa).

On IDEAS, there are multiple prompts about the availability of different versions. On the article listing of the journal, a green “WP” appears when a working paper version is available. Then, on the abstract page of the article, the pill for download tab mentions it again. And, finally, the working paper versions are listed right under the download link (and the article version on the working paper download link).

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Working papers are pretty much where the frontier of research is in economics. Journal articles are in this respect a historical record of where the frontier was a few years prior, given the publication delays. This is why the email alerting service of RePEc, NEP, notifies about new working papers, but not about articles. Universities and policy institutions are welcome to index their working papers in RePEc, it is free and follows the same instructions as for journals. And if an author does not have access to a local RePEc-indexed working papers series, they can upload their works at MPRA.

Leave a Comment » | Dissemination of research in Economics, Open Access | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

100 countries contribute through RePEc archives

July 1, 2019

The mission of RePEc is to enhance the dissemination of research in Economics. An essential part of this is the democratization of access to research, both for the readers to find research and for researchers to make their works accessible. This means that no matter where you work, you should have the same access to research. In that respect, we believe RePEc has made great strides. For example, our logs indicate that we have visitors to our sites from every country (including Antarctica and North Korea).

To get material added to RePEc, an institution typically opens a so-called local RePEc archive that contains information about its publications. We are proud to announce that with the recent addition of Armenia and the Central African Republic we now have such RePEc archives in over 100 countries. As some of those over 2000 archives aggregate material from several institutions, the count is even higher for the indexed works.

Here is the listing of the 101 countries to date that have opened at least one RePEc archive. Here is the listing of the current archives. And finally, here are the instructions for opening a local RePEc archive.

Leave a Comment » | Dissemination of research in Economics, Open Archives | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

5000 working paper series on RePEc: working papers are still central to economics

May 31, 2019

RePEc now indexes now over 5000 working papers series, and we take this opportunity to highlight how these open-access pre-prints are central to RePEc and economics research in general. Indeed, the peer-review process in economics is particularly excruciating, as it is quite common for the process to take several years from submission to publication. Multiply this if a manuscript needs to be submitted to several journals (the best journals have acceptance rates below 10%), and you quickly understand that the published research often disseminates research that is several years old.

A reaction to these delays has been the introduction of working papers. Initially disseminated on paper among friends and colleagues, they quickly became the go-to medium if you wanted to know where the frontier of research was. Several institutions then institutionalized the practice by creating official working paper series one could subscribe to, in some cases against a fee to cover printing and shipping costs. Working papers, sometimes also called discussion papers, are considered preliminary work that is not definitive and disseminated for discussion and awareness. Yet, they are sometimes refereed within the issuing institutions, as in some ways their reputation rides on the papers. Also, authors often prefer their working papers to the corresponding published articles, as the latter are sometimes altered in unintended ways through the tyranny of referees as well as shortened by editors with space constraints.

RePEc was created to enhance the dissemination of research in economics, and specifically of working papers. Indeed, unlike journals, working papers were disseminated in an informal way, and one needed to be “in the know” to get them. RePEc has helped bridge that gap and make working papers available to everyone. While the dissemination of working papers is now much improved, the publication delays only got worse, hence working papers are still central to following the frontier of research. This is why RePEc disseminates new working papers through NEP and not new journal articles. And we also have noticed that if a working paper and a journal version are available in parallel, the working paper is downloaded many times more than the article (even after removing the NEP downloads).

If your working paper series is not yet available on RePEc, follow these instructions. To see which series are currently indexed, see the listings on EconPapers or IDEAS.

Leave a Comment » | Dissemination of research in Economics, Economics Profession, Open Access | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

RePEc to take over Google Scholar

April 1, 2019

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.

Leave a Comment » | Dissemination of research in Economics | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

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