The Economics of Open Access Publishing

April 24, 2009

Open Access Publishing is the free distribution of research, whether it is as a pre-print (working paper) or a peer-reviewed article. Since the creation of the web, more and more journal are choosing open access as their business model. One of them was recently Economic Analysis and Policy, published by the Economic Society of Australia (Queensland). To celebrate this, EAP has just published a special issue dedicated to the Economics of Open Access Publishing. Articles are written by economists discussing their experience with open access as well as by others involved in open access publishing. They cover the transition the publishing industry is currently undergoing, the surprisingly low cost of publishing an open access journal, the impact of open access and various open source aspects of the open access.

2 Comments | Dissemination of research in Economics, Open Archives | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

Tips for authors to improve their RePEc ranking

April 16, 2009

By far the most popular topic on this blog is material about rankings. People love to know who the best are and how they fare. This post is about optimizing one’s ranking within RePEc, and doing so in a way that does not trigger our safeguards against cheating. It turns out all the following points are points we actually want to encourage anyway so as to improve the quality of the data collected in RePEc.

As an author, here is what you can do once you logged into the RePEc Author Service:


  1. Make sure all your works listed in RePEc are actually in your profile. Thus, do not remove from your profile working papers that have been published. Some working paper series have higher impact factors than many journals, and working papers are much more downloaded than articles. In addition, if all versions are in your profile, we can link between them. (If you previously refused items that were yours, you can recuperate them by clicking on the “refused” tab in your research page, unrefuse the relevant items, and then redo the search)
  2. Make sure the name variations listed in your profile really encompass all possible ways a publisher may have listed your name. The automatic search is only going to find works with such names.
  3. There may be additional citations waiting for your approval. These are those for which we have less confidence that they pertain to the right work. Click on the “citation” tab in your author account.
  4. Link to your profile on EconPapers or IDEAS from your homepage or email signature.
  5. When refering to your works on a web page, put the link to EconPapers or IDEAS. We cannot count downloads that do not transit through RePEc services.
  6. Make sure all your works are listed on RePEc. For the missing ones, encourage the publisher to list them, or get your department to open a working paper series, or upload your works on the Munich Personal RePEc Archive.

As an institution, you can optimize your ranking by making sure your registered authors follow the advice from above and:

  1. Make sure everyone is registered and maintains his/her profile.
  2. Make sure everyone gives the proper affiliation. You can check who is listed with you by finding your institution on EDIRC.
  3. Have your working paper series listed on RePEc. Instructions are here.

If everyone optimizes like this, RePEc data will be more complete, current and useful. Help us make it better!

Leave a Comment » | RePEc rankings | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

RePEc in March 2009

April 5, 2009

The big news this month is that RePEc has reached 1000 participating archives. This was achieved with an almost record crop in new archives, 16: Center for Industrial Studies Milano, INESC Porto, El Trimestre Económico, Netherlands Competition Authority, Asia-Pacific Policy Center, Villanova University, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Economic Publishing House, Romanian-American University, Lille Graduate School of Management, Yildiz Technical University, GWS Institute of Economic Structures Research, Bogazici University, Agricultural University of Athens, Kyushu Sangyo University, Portuguese Journal of Management Studies. In addition, over 2500 working paper series are now listed.

A new ranking has been published, one for young economists. And in terms of traffic, March was as busy as ever with 846,487 file downloads and 3,202,521 abstract views.

Other thresholds we passed in the past month:
120,000,000 cumulative abstracts views on IDEAS
350,000 new paper announcements disseminated through NEP
240,000 cited items

Leave a Comment » | Workings of RePEc | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

The best young economists?

March 25, 2009

Who are the best young economists? RePEc publishes all sorts of rankings based on its data, but has so far been missing one that highlights the best young economists. Indeed, they are typically invisible from the general rankings as it takes many years to build up the required body of work and citations to be featured among the top economists.

Unfortunately, authors registering with RePEc do not supply their year of birth or the year they obtained their last graduate degree. However, RePEc has information about the date of most publications, and it is then possible to determine (roughly) when a career started. Here, we do not make the type of publication (article vs. working paper, for example), as the goal is to try to approximate when the economist started being active in research.

Based on this criterion, two groups of economists are selected: those with their first publication, whatever the medium, less than five years ago, and those less than ten years ago. Quite obviously, there is considerably more measurement error compared to that already present in the general ranking, first because of the imperfect measure of the start of the career, second because the body of work is typically much smaller. But we hope people will still find these rankings useful.

5 Comments | RePEc rankings | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

Volunteer recognition: Marco Novarese

March 18, 2009

In our continuing series featuring RePEc volunteers, we present today Marco Novarese. He is assistant professor at the faculty of Law, University of Piemonte Orientale (Italy) and he directs the NEP project within RePEc. NEP disseminates new working papers though email and RSS in currently 84 different fields, each staffed by an editor who sorts what is relevant among all new items. Marco edits the NEP report on Cognitive and Behavioural Economics, but more importantly heads the entire project. His responsibility is to solicit and recruit new editors, encourage the creation of new reports (volunteer if your field is not covered) and monitor the project.

Before heading NEP, Marco’s responsibility was to check that the data sent to NEP editors for appraisal is clean and does not contain obvious misfits (papers that are not new, for example). Not having found a volunteer to do this, he is still on the hook. Maybe you can help him out?

Leave a Comment » | RePEc volunteers | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

1000 archives participating in RePEc

March 10, 2009

With last week’s additions, RePEc is now carrying bibliographic data from over 1000 archives. This is a good opportunity to give a reminder how data actually makes it to RePEc. Indeed, there is no staff at RePEc that would be inputing data, this is all provided directly from the publishers. These, be it commercial publishers, Economics department, research centers or central banks, put files at a predetermined address on their web or ftp server, following the Guildford protocol. These files follow a set syntax codified by ReDIF (Research Documents Information Format). The RePEc services then gather this bibliographic data on a regular schedule (typically every night) and display it to the public.

Thus, if you are a publisher and want something listed on RePEc, follow our step-by-step instructions. If you are an author unhappy that some of your works are missing, encourage your publisher(s) to participate. Alternatively have your institutions participate with its working papers (most publishers allow pre-prints or post-prints to be posted) or load your works up at the Munich Personal RePEc Archive.

Update (March 13): We have now also supassed 2500 working paper series…

2 Comments | Open Archives | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

RePEc in February 2009

March 3, 2009

A short, but busy month considering we were close to beat our monthly traffic records, with 859,562 file downloads and 3,115,704 abstract views. We also continue adding material at a tremendous pace, about 500 items a day and 15 new authors register every day.

The following archives joined RePEc: Cairn.info, Università di Roma Sapienza, University of Nottingham (II), Management and Organization Review, CEFIG Budapest, Latvijas Banka, University of Pisa, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, South Dakota State University.

In terms of thresholds passed, we have the following:
25,000,000 downloads through IDEAS
600,000 items available online
140,000 items with JEL codes
900 journals

Leave a Comment » | Workings of RePEc | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

Weathering the crisis

February 25, 2009

The news are filled with reports of financial difficulties and funding is being cut left and right for all sorts of programs. How is RePEc affected? On the revenue side, we are happy to report that it is stable, at zero. On the expense side, we seem to be unchanged, at zero as well. RePEc is completely run by volunteers so that it does not rely on funding and can provide its services for free to everyone.

That does not mean that there are no risks. RePEc services also rely on hardware and hosting services. So far, we have managed to find sponsors for those. We have little slack, though. If a machine were to fail, or a host were to give up a slot, we would have to scramble for solutions. We are therefore always on the lookout for new opportunities. We even have a new project currently looking for a home. If you are interested in any capacity, do not hesitate to contact us!

Leave a Comment » | RePEc volunteers | Permalink
Posted by Christian Zimmermann

RePEc archives: AgEcon Search

February 18, 2009

This guest post was written by Julie Kelly and Louise Letnes.

Over the past few months, the papers that make up AgEcon Search have been added to RePEc. All papers are available in full text, and they include working papers, conference papers and articles from smaller journals.

AgEcon Search includes a wide range of topics in applied economics, including agricultural, development, energy, environmental, and resource economics. Over 170 groups from 20+ countries contribute their work. As of early 2009, 27 journals are included.

The journals that are included in AgEcon Search are mostly small press journals with limited circulation, and for many it is the only electronic access that is available. Some have volumes back to the 1940s, and a number obtained small grants for the digitizing of older materials. A few have one or two year embargoes on the newest issues, but most do not. Recently, several of the journals have dropped their embargoes.

AgEcon Search began in 1994 as a local solution for the applied and agricultural economics working papers from the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin. It is housed at the University of Minnesota, and co-sponsored by the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA).

The involvement of the large professional associations has been critical to the success of AgEcon Search. Economists presenting Contributed Papers at the annual AAEA meeting must submit their full papers to AgEcon Search prior to the meeting, or they will be dropped from the program. The European Association of Agricultural Economists and the International Association of Agricultural Economists have adopted similar procedures.

Two librarians, Louise Letnes and Julie Kelly, serve as coordinators of AgEcon Search. They work at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Applied Economics and the University Libraries, respectively. Among their duties, they attend agricultural and applied economics conferences to promote AgEcon Search and recruit new material.

Leave a Comment » | Open Archives | Permalink
Posted by repecblogguest

Economics Search Engine

February 11, 2009

The Economics Search Engine (ESE) is a subset of the Google search engine that restricts its searches to 23,000 economics web sites. It is an outgrowth of Resources for Economists on the Internet (RFE) which lists and describes items for economists. Today many users prefer to use search engines to find resources of interest, so ESE was developed with the assistance of Hal Varian and Othar Hansson, both of Google. ESE not only searches web sites listed in RFE, but also web sites from RePEc Author Services (over 19,000 economists have registered) and Economics Departments, Institutes and Research Centers in the World (EDIRC), which lists more than 11,000 such sites. Thus, by searching at ESE, a user interested in an economic topic is searching over a substantial fraction of the web devoted to economic issues.

ESE is implemented with a Google Custom Search Engine, which enables users to set up a site that restricts a Google search to a user-selected set of sites. It takes some work to set up one as large as ESE, but smaller ones are quite straightforward and doubtless many would benefit from setting one up for their own needs. As with many Google services, it is currently in beta test-mode, so the results might be problematic at times.

To make ESE particularly easy to use, it includes a “Search Plugin” for Internet Explorer 7.0 or FireFox 2.0 and 3.0 users. This allows you to initiate searches directly from a search box in your browser; thus you don’t even need to visit ESE directly. You should be offered one for ESE when you check your search plugins when you’re at the ESE web site.

Leave a Comment » | Use of RePEc data | Permalink
Posted by Bill Goffe

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