Digital scholarly communication in Economics: from NetEc to RePEc

1
Digital scholarly communication in Economics
from NetEc to RePEc

• Thomas Krichel
• http//openlib.org/home/krichel
• work partly sponsored by the Joint Information
  Systems Committee through its Electronic
  Libraries Programme

2
Structure of this talk

• History from NetEc (founded 1993) to RePEc
  (founded 1997)
• Operational principles and mission of RePEc

3
Early history of my interest

• 1991
• Contents Warwick Working Paper acquisitions
  lists in CoREJ
• Technology email lists
• Idea distribute the acquisitions lists through
  email lists
• leads to the foundation of BibEc

• 1992
• Contents Public domain software for TeX, emacs,
  etc
• Technology anonymous ftp
• Idea make papers available on public archive
  that are accessible on the Internet
• leads to the foundation of WoPEc

4
The Foundation of NetEc

• NetEc is a group of Internet-based services that
  help scholarly communication in Economics. It is
  an early example of a cyberspace charity.
• It was founded in February 1993 on a gopher
  server at Manchester Computing.
• On the WWW since 1994,
• mirrored in Japan and the United States since
  1995.
• The initial services were BibEc and WoPEc.

5
The BibEc project 1993 to 1997

• Based mainly on acquisitions data for printed
  economics working papers from the Documentation
  Center of the Economics department at the
  University of Montreal.
• Run on a volunteer basis by Thomas Krichel and
  Fethy Mili
• Holdings go back to the late 1980s, around 40,000
  items
• data is converted to html and placed on a web
  server

6
The WoPEc project 1993 to 1997

• Central collection of bibliographic data on
  electronic working papers
• Initially unpaid volunteer work by José Manuel
  Barrueco Cruz and Thomas Krichel
• In 1996--1998 JISC funding allows José Manuel to
  work full time on the project
• 5,000 papers in 1997

7
BibEc and WoPEc 1993 to 1997

• Data converted to a whois/IAFA like format
• static gopher/web pages updated periodically
• whois server (powered by digger of bunyip.com)
  with web-based fielded queries using an in-house
  query script
• WAIS index of the full-text pages
• WoPEc-announce and BibEc-announce mailing lists

8
Closely Related efforts 1993--1997

• EconWPA
• manually integrated into WoPEc since 1994
• Fed in Print
• integrated into BibEc and WoPEc since 1994
• departmental archives e.g., Humbolt Universität,
  University of California San Diego
• DEGREE
• S-WoPEc

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Related efforts Other NetEc projects

• CodEc 1994--
• Collection of computer code by Dirk Eddelbüttel
• WebEc 1994--
• Collection of WWW links to resources for
  economists, by Lauri Saarinen joined NetEc in
  1995
• JokEc 1995--
• Collection of jokes about economists, by Pasi
  Kuoppomäki, joined NetEc in 1997

10
Projects associated with NetEc

• They are mirrored on the NetEc sites, but are not
  part of NetEc
• Resources for Economists on the Internet by
  William L. Goffe
• Economics Departments, Institutions and Research
  Centers (EDIRC) by Christian Zimmermann

11
NetEc and Co. 1997

• A set of services,
• all are free to the end-user,
• most are powered by volunteers,
• build through centralized collection therefore
  not sustainable as the data mass increases,
• most service have specific user interfaces to
  their data,
• many functions are mirrored on the three sites

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Focus on the digital academic papers

• BibEc and WoPEc were centralized collections of
  metadata about documents held at various archives
  and from various providers, they needed to
  decentralize.
• In the early days of the projects, a distributed
  database approach was thought to be the way
  forward, for example using the whois protocol,
  or Dienst
• an alternative approach would to collect all
  papers in one archive, the approach that works
  successfully for arXiv.org but unsuccessfully for
  EconWPA
• Debate on centralized versus decentralized
  distribution

13
Bill Goffes vision 1995

• What I would suggest is this a distributed
  system with any number of sites, each mirroring
  each other. archives could "join" the system
  (say it was written in perl so could run on NT as
  well as Unix). Then you'd have the best of both
  worlds Such a system could easily grow with
  the profession's use of the net. Such a system
  would GREATLY benefit the profession.
• Bill suggested a system based on a system like
  usenet news.

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The foundation of RePEc

• Founding fathers the BibEc and WoPEc projects,
  DEGREE, S-WoPEc
• two initial drafts by Thomas Krichel were revised
  at a meeting in Guildford in May 1997
• ReDIF, a metadata format
• The Guildford protocol, a convention how to store
  ReDIF on ftp or http servers

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RePEc principle

• Many archives
• archives offer metadata about digital objects
  (mainly working papers)
• One database
• The data from all archives forms one single
  logical database despite the fact that it is held
  on different servers.
• Many services
• users can access the data through many
  interfaces.
• providers of archives offer their data to all
  interfaces at the same time. This provides for an
  optimal distribution.

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RePEc is based on 130 archives

• WoPEc
• EconWPA
• DEGREE
• S-WoPEc
• NBER
• CEPR

• US Fed in Print
• IMF
• OECD
• MIT
• University of Surrey
• CO PAH

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to form one dataset...

• over 100,000 items in over 1,000 series, contains
  working paper, published paper, software,
  personal and institutional data
• largest distributed free source about online
  scientific publications, over 32,000 electronic
  papers
• data is encoded using the purpose-built ReDIF
  format
• all archives follow a convention called the
  Guildford protocol on how to store ReDIF files
  and other data on their servers. Therefore the
  archives can be mirrored.

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RePEc is used in many services

• BibEc and WoPEc
• Decomate Z39.50 service
• NEP New Economics Papers
• Inomics

• IDEAS
• RuPEc
• EDIRC
• HoPEc

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describes documents

• Template-Type ReDIF-Paper 1.0
• Title Dynamic Aspect of Growth and Fiscal Policy
• Author-Name Thomas Krichel
• Author-Person RePEcper1965-06-05thomas_kriche
  l
• Author-Email T.Krichel_at_surrey.ac.uk
• Author-Name Paul Levine
• Author-Email P.Levine_at_surrey.ac.uk
• Author-WorkPlace-Name University of Surrey
• Classification-JEL C61 E21 E23 E62 O41
• File-URL ftp//www.econ.surrey.ac.uk/
  pub/RePEc/sur/surrec/surrec9601.pdf
• File-Format application/pdf
• Creation-Date 199603
• Revision-Date 199711
• Handle RePEcsursurrec9601

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describes persons (HoPEc)

• Template-Type ReDIF-Person 1.0
• Name-Full KRICHEL, THOMAS
• Name-First THOMAS
• Name-Last KRICHEL
• Postal 1 Martyr Court
• 10 Martyr Road
• Guildford GU1 4LF
• England
• Email t.krichel_at_surrey.ac.uk
• Homepage http//gretel.econ.surrey.ac.uk
• Workplace-Institution RePEcedidesuruk
• Author-Paper RePEcsursurrec9801
• Author-Paper RePEcsursurrec9601
• Author-Paper RePEcrpcrdfdocconcepts
• Author-Paper RePEcrpcrdfdocReDIF
• Handle RePEcper1965-06-05THOMAS_KRICHEL

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describes institutions (EDIRC)

• Template-Type ReDIF-Institution 1.0
• Primary-Name University of Surrey
• Primary-Location Guildford
• Secondary-Name Department of Economics
• Secondary-Phone [phone]
• Secondary-Email economics_at_surrey.ac.uk
• Secondary-Fax [phone]
• Secondary-Postal Guildford, Surrey GU2 5XH
• Secondary-Homepage
• http//www.econ.surrey.ac.uk/
• Handle RePEcedidesuruk

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The RePEc vision

• It is a collaborative effort of community
  wide-knowledge sharing by discpline champions and
  librarians. The relational features allow to
  share the burden of cataloguing and reduce the
  cost of keeping the collection up-to-date.
• Once a critical mass of data and user services is
  reached outsiders face strong incentives to
  contribute.
• RePEc promotes free exchange of data between
  academics.
• It fights the appropriation of scientific
  material through the Faustian Bargain of
  academics and publishers.

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Conclusion

• When a technological shock (like the Internet)
  hits a social structure (like the scholarly
  communication system), then there is an
  opportunity for new entrants to come along.
• This opportunity is here today.
• Seize it.