The future of scholarly communication in Economics

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The future of scholarly communication in
Economics

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

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Disclaimer

• All I am saying today is a personal opinion. It
  does not reflect the official policy of the
  groups that I am associated with.
• These slides may not be distributed without my
• prior authorisation.

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1997 The birth 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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The RePEc three-layer model

• Many archives
• One database
• Many services
• many user interfaces
• providers of archives offer their data to all
  interfaces at the same time.

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RePEc is based on 120 archives

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

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

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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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My vision of RePEc

• It is a collaborative effort of community
  wide-knowledge sharing.
• RePEc promotes free exchange of data between
  academics.
• It fights the division of the world in
  information-rich and information-poor.
• It should work to end the commercial costly
  commercial intermediation between academics

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Faustian Bargain

• Scholars produce work for free.
• Scholars review for free.
• Scholars buy back their own work from the
  publishers
• Academics pay twice!
• but this system is under attack from two forces

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Destroyer 1 Serial cost spiral

• Decline in personal subscriptions, libraries are
  the single customer group.
• Library spending has little increase.
• Price rise for library prices.
• Libraries cancel titles.
• Publishers raise prices further.

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Bergstroms proposal

• Do no longer review for journal that have a high
  cost
• Great echo within the profession, support from
• Robert Ashenfelter, Larry Kotlikoff, Gareth
  Miles, Martin Osborne, Ariel Rubinstein
• Ted will be working on a list of journal most
  likely to have monopolistic pricing in the
  summer.
• He will maintain a public list of supporters.

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Destroyer 2 Peer review delay

• Now common that it takes about four years to get
  a paper published.
• Material that is formally published is already
  way out of date, museum value.
• Crucial need for a fast filter (FF).

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FF1 NEP New Economics Papers

• Founded 1998 by Thomas Krichel
• Set of about 40 reports on recent additions to
  RePEc
• Editors receive a full list of new additions to
  RePEc and make a choice about what papers to
  include in the report.
• first step towards peer review using RePEc

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The future is yours more fast filters

• First mover advantage is important
• old universities are the most famous
• old journals are most famous
• Need to know the latest literature anyway
• Important value of peer recognition by operating
  the filter

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FF2 The Surweb site

• Site that lists interesting work in a certain
  area using some structure. It make a short
  comment on that work.
• May be maintained jointly with a NEP report
• list older issues of a report
• further selection of items
• inclusion of comments to describe technical
  essence

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FF3 The review site

• Form a small editorial team
• draw up a set of public guidelines
• communicate decisions as a community
• Authors submit papers
• require deposit in a RePEc archive
• author chooses to put paper publicly visible or
  not
• 1 before 1 rule
• before a paper may be reviewed, all of its
  authors must review the paper of another author

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• There should be two reports by paper, otherwise
  editorial team has to help out.
• Editorial team edits a final report out of the
  two reports
• Public element with emphasis on current state of
  the paper and its relations to other papers
• Private element with emphasis on helping authors
  to improve paper
• Author may choose to
• publish the paper with the public report attached
• withdraw/resubmit the paper

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Review site ethics

• Do not say that you are competing with journals,
  rather say that you are making papers fitter for
  subsequent review in journals.
• Never say that your service is free, free means
  bad to many economists.
• Base your work with RePEc
• gives some credibility.
• help on technical matters
• more fun

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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.