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

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

How does RePEc promote Open Access?

October 25, 2018

This week is Open Access Week, and this gives us the opportunity to highlight how RePEc has been promoting open access to economic literature since 1997 (and since 1992 with its predecessor projects). We want to distinguish here two ways research is open in economics: through pre-prints and through open access journals.

Pre-prints

Economics has a long tradition of pre-prints that predates the web. Usually called working papers or discussion papers, they have become popular because publication delays are very long in economics (measured in years). The origin of RePEc lies in making the dissemination of those pre-prints more efficient by providing central services for their discovery. Before, it was very difficult for those outside existing top institutions to know what the current frontier of research was. As is still valid now, publication in journals was really a historical record of where the research frontier was a few years earlier. Now, RePEc has records for over 800,000 pre-prints and disseminates them through web sites, mailing lists, RSS feeds and Twitter. They are also included in the citation analysis and they are indeed cited on a level field with journal articles. In fact, RePEc does not privilege journal articles over pre-prints, yet working papers are downloaded seven more times than the corresponding articles.

For those who stumble upon a journal article in a RePEc site, the alternative version as a pre-print is offered when available. This is particularly useful when the journal is gated: this allows the reader without a subscription to still have a read of the full paper. Sometimes it is not the final version, and sometimes it is even a more complete version as the editorial process may have required cuts. Such links from article to pre-print are particularly frequent for the most cited works.

Open access journals

RePEc is also indexing journal articles, and this includes the open access ones. Typically, they are noted with a special notice indicating that the full text can be downloaded freely. In addition, gated journals are not privileged in any way over open access ones: RePEc invites all journals to be indexed, as long as they are willing to follow our instructions. This allows small independent journals to get the same opportunity as journals from the largest commercial publishers to be searched and found on RePEc sites. In fact, free downloads does lead to more frequent downloads.

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

New facilities for RePEc authors to enrich their publication metadata

November 7, 2014

In his recent post Thomas Krichel discussed some new Socionet facilities for authors which technically work as a creation of semantic linkages between different RePEc entities (papers, personal profiles, etc.).

As Thomas mentioned at the moment we, i.e. the Socionet team, are opening these new facilities to RePEc users for experimentation. The easiest way to get to take part is to have an  account at the RePEc Author Service (RAS). I have a conference paper with the technical details.

RAS registrants with linked publications can make experiments in seven main use cases. Let me take these in turn:

1. You can specify the roles of your co-authorship in the making of a collective paper. The idea for such a facility and initial taxonomy of author roles comes from a Nature commentary (http://www.nature.com/news/publishing-credit-where-credit-is-due-1.15033) as well as from the CRediT project. The Wellcome Trust, Digital Science, CASRAI, and NISO as members of this project that has also started a survey on the Standardized Taxonomy for Contributor Roles.

2. You can make some updates to the way your paper is described. It can be done in two ways: 1) by annotating text fragments of a paper’s abstract to provide readers with additional and/or newer information on the topic; and 2) by linking a paper to its newest versions, and/or to related papers that appeared later.

3. You can link your paper to show to readers an evolution of ideas or a development of approaches through a set of your papers.

4. You can contribute data on how the works referenced in your paper are used.

5. You can make recommendations to and/or share useful information with registered authors whose papers you are looking at. In this case your proposal will look as a linkage with some taxonomy between some of your papers and the one you are currently reading.

6. You can establish relationships of scientific development or complementarity between your paper and the one you are currently reading.

7. You can issue your professional opinion about another paper by using a specific taxonomy.

You can look at one of my papers where I made some enrichment. You will see the implementation of above points 1, 2, 3, and 4.

I plan to publish at the blog notes with instructions how to test each use case listed above.  It will provide discussions about taxonomies that we used, user interfaces that we built and so on.

We would like to have feedback from the community on this new technology and on created new opportunities for scientists. I see a lot of benefits for the research community related with further development of this approach.

If you have your account at RePEc Author Service, you can open your publications at Socionet, log in, and make experiments with its enrichment right now.

There are three simple ways to find a paper of yours at Socionet:

1. By a Google search with a string like this “site:socionet.ru krichel redif”, where keywords “krichel” and “redif” specify you as an author and something from a title or an abstract of your paper;

2. If you know your RAS short-ID (use RePEc Short-ID lookup tool) you can open your personal profile at Socionet and use hyperlinks to your publications there. To open your profile at Socionet replace in this URL the word “short-ID” on your real RAS short-ID –  http://socionet.ru/pub.xml?l=en&h=repec:per:pers:short-ID.  For example, Thomas Krichel has RAS shotr-ID = pkr1. So the URL to his personal profile at Socionet is http://socionet.ru/pub.xml?l=en&h=repec:per:pers:pkr1

3. If you can find a handle (RePEc ID) of your paper in IDEAS or EconPapers, you can just insert it instead of word “handle” into this URL – http://socionet.ru/pub.xml?l=en&h=handle, e.g. for a handle “repec:rpc:rdfdoc:redif” the URL should be like this – http://socionet.ru/pub.xml?l=en&h=repec:rpc:rdfdoc:redif

See also detailed instruction on how to log into the system with your RAS short-ID.

Note: at Socionet pages of papers, personal profiles, etc. at the right top corner there is a link to switch on the another language version. The link will be “[eng]” or “[рус]” depends on which language version is now opened.

Enjoy!

Leave a Comment » | Dissemination of research in Economics, Open Access, RePEc features, Use of RePEc data | Permalink
Posted by Sergey Parinov

Let the Reader Decide!

May 27, 2014

I just learned about  a new journal with a new concept that sounds interesting: Royal Society Open Science. It has a review process and will publish all articles which are scientifically sound, leaving judgement of importance and impact to the reader.

This seems apposite because printing costs and distribution costs are practically absent in the Internet age. So there is no big point in rationing publication space (that is not scarce anymore) by  “importance” or “impact”.

Unfortunately this  journal does not cover economics.

2 Comments | Dissemination of research in Economics, Open Access | Permalink
Posted by Ekkehart Schlicht