RePEc: a early example of an open library

1
RePEc a early example of an open library

• Thomas Krichel
• 2006-12-14

2
Open libraries and scholarly communication

• RePEc is an example for an Open Library.
• An Open Library is loosely defined an application
  of the OSS principles to libraries.
• vague
• in the making
• but has some history
• Looking at RePEc will fix ideas.

3
scholarly communication

• Is mainly about scholars communicating
• between themselves
• to students, occasionally
• Thus it is essentially a community activity.
• Traditionally, there have been two intermediaries
  acting as external agents.
• libraries
• publishers

4
when tradition ends

• Two external shock
• There comes the Internet and reduces distribution
  costs to zero
• There comes computer technology and reduces
  storage costs somewhat
• opportunity sets of community members and
  external agents increases
• Proposition the future depends much on what the
  community members decide. External agents have
  little impact.

5
discipline communities

• Scholars of various disciplines have varying
  habits of research, publication, and evaluation
• It is likely that the Internet will emphasize
  those differences rather than reducing them.

6
examples disciplines with established informal
publishing

• Preprint communities
• Physics ? arxiv.org
• Mathematics ? arxiv.org, partially
• Working paper communities
• Computer Science ? CiteSeer
• (working paper disappearing)
• Economics ? RePEc

7
change is tough

• Change has to come inside the discipline.
• There has to come a pioneering individual who
• is technically well versed
• is managerially smart
• has extraordinary forward thinking
• is willing to take considerable risk with her
  career
• Ginsparg, Krichel, Giles Lawrence are rare

8
RePEc History

• It started with me as a research assistant an in
  the Economics Department of Loughborough
  University of Technology in 1990.
• a predecessor of the Internet allowed me to
  download free software without effort
• but academic papers had to be gathered in a
  painful way

9
CoREJ

• published by HMSO
• Photocopied lists of contents tables recently
  published economics journal received at the
  Department of Trade and Industry
• Typed list of the recently received working
  papers received by the University of Warwick
  library
• The latter was the more interesting.

10
working papers

• early accounts of research findings
• published by economics departments
• in universities
• in research centers
• in some government offices
• in multinational administrations
• disseminated through exchange agreements
• important because of 4 year publishing delay

11
1991-1992

• I planned to circulate the Warwick working paper
  list over listserv lists
• I argued it would be good for them
• increase incentives to contribute
• increase revenue for ILL
• After many trials, Warwick refused.
• During the end of that time, I was offered a
  lectureship, and decided to get working on my own
  collection.

12
1993 BibEc and WoPEc

• Fethy Mili of Université de Montréal had a good
  collection of papers and gave me his data.
• I put his bibliographic data on a gopher and
  called the service "BibEc"
• I also gathered the first ever online electronic
  working papers on a gopher and called the service
  "WoPEc".

13
NetEc consortium

• BibEc printed papers
• WoPEc electronic papers
• CodEc software
• WebEc web resource listings
• JokEc jokes
• HoPEc
• a lot of Ec!

14
WoPEc to RePEc

• WoPEc was a catalog record collection
• WoPEc remained largest web access point
• but getting contributions was tough
• In 1996 I wrote basic architecture for RePEc.
• ReDIF
• Guildford Protocol

15
1997 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.

16
RePEc is based on 670 archives

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

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

17
to form a 433k item dataset

• 191,000 working papers
• 237,000 journal articles
• 1,400 software components
• 2,300 book and chapter listings
• 11,000 author contact and publication
  listings
• 10,000 institutional contact listings

18
RePEc is used in many services

• Econpapers
• Decomate Z39.50 service
• NEP New Economics Papers
• Inomics
• RePEc author service

• IDEAS
• RuPEc
• EDIRC
• LogEc
• CitEc

19
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

20
describes persons (RAS)

• template-type ReDIF-Person 1.0
• name-full MANKIW, N. GREGORY
• name-last MANKIW
• name-first N. GREGORY
• handle RePEcper1984-06-16N__GREGORY_MANKIW
• email ngmankiw_at_harvard.edu
• homepagehttp//post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty
  /
• mankiw/mankiw.html
• workplace-institution RePEcedideharus
• workplace-institution RePEcedinberrus
• Author-Article RePEcaeaaecrevv76y1986i4p
  676-91
• Author-Article RePEcaeaaecrevv77y1987i3p
  358-74
• Author-Article RePEcaeaaecrevv78y1988i2p
  173-77
• .

21
describes institutions

• 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

22
what do open libraries do?

• Identify records
• Relate identified records
• These actions require human control.
• They prepare for assessment of performance.

23
key to success

• Have a small group of volunteers
• Disseminate as widely as possible
• Demonstrate to authors and institutions that it
  works for them.
• institutional registration
• author registration

24
institutional registration

• It started by one sad geezer making a list of
  departments that have a web site.
• I persuaded him that his data would be more
  widely used if integrated into the RePEc
  database.
• Now he is a happy geezer and one of our three
  crucial volunteers.

25
RePEc author service

• RePEc document data has author names as strings.
• The authors register with RAS to list contact
  details and identify the papers they wrote.
• This is classic access control, but done by the
  authors.

26
author registration

• It started when funding allowed us to hire a
  crazy programmer to write an author registration
  system.
• The system went online as "HoPEc" in late 2000.
• It has been renamed "RePEc author service" (RAS)
• A recent grant from OSI allows for a rewrite and
  expansion.

27
(No Transcript)
28
LogEc

• It is a service by Sune Karlsson that tracks
  usage of items in the RePEc database
• abstract views
• downloads
• There is mail that is sent by Christian
  Zimmermann to
• archive maintainers
• RAS registrants
• that contains a monthly usage summary.

29
authors' incentives

• Authors perceive the registration as a way to
  achieve common advertising for their papers.
• Author records are used to aggregate usage logs
  across RePEc user services for all papers of an
  author.
• Stimulates a "I am bigger than you are"
  mentality. Size matters!

30
recently

• In 2004, Peter Jasco compared RePEc services with
  the EconLit proprietary professional database.
• IDEAS and LogEc were Peters pick
• EconLit was Peters pan.
• He slammed the working paper coverage of EconLit.
  
• He could have slammed other things.

31
RePEc / EconLit partnership

• RePEc now delivers all its working paper data to
  EconLit, without getting the journal data of
  EconLit in return.
• This may seem absolutely perverse! A bunch of
  volunteers laboring for a multi-million
  concern!
• In fact it serves RePEc well because it adds
  officialdom.

32
partnership with library officialdom

• Recently, the Zentralbibliothek fuer
  Wirtschaftswissenschaften (ZBW) have become
  interested in working with RePEc.
• The aim is to build a new dataset called LoTEc
  for the moment.
• LoT means Long Term, but could also mean a lot.

33
automated full-text collection

• The idea behind LoTEc is to build a system that
  collects full-text from metadata.
• take title and author data
• search Google for it
• examine search results if the could be the full
  text
• http//openlib.org/home/krichel/proposals/khabarov
  sk.pdf is a funding application with more ideas
  about such systems.

34
konz project

• The konz project software is a prototype for
  LoTEc
• uses DBLP
• title searches only
• limited to PDF / MS office full-text
• Results of konz are thin. only 5 of full-text
  found. Probably the fault of bad programming (by
  myself).

35
will LoTEc do better?

• Recent work on a small sample of 460 papers by
  Bergstrom finds a self-archiving ratio of about
  80 for top-level recent research papers.
• There are chances that we will find these if we
  can improve over the konz software.
• Initial tests to be done on the current version
  of konz in early 2007.

36
whats good a paper in an archive?

• Unless we have the authors permission, we can
  not make a paper available in archived form (on
  our server). All we could do is make metadata
  available.
• To gather permissions from the authors the plan
  is to use the RePEc author service in stage four
  of the ACIS project.

37
validation / permissions interface

• For a paper that an author has written, RAS
  would present a set of potential full-text files
  and ask
• is this a full-text of this paper?
• can we make an archived copy of this paper
  available for public use?
• This interface is supposed to be set up during
  2007.

38
KEY idea 1

• RePEc attracts a community of users and
  contributors
• The community itself is the focus of attention
• RePEc describes the living rather than the dead.
• Forget about documents!

39
KEY idea 2

• Forget about users!
• Disseminate widely
• Users will come through Google anyway.
• And Google loves RePEc services
• puts RePEc services top when the query consists
  of the name of an author

40
obstacles to open libraries

• lack of imagination entrepreneurship
• inability to form alliances
• user-centered thinking
• document-centered thinking
• technical competence required
• OAI PMH
• XML and XML Schema
• Unicode
• the "C" word

41
http//openlib.org/home/krichel

• Thank you for your attention!