Academic self-organization on the Internet. The example of RePEc

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Academic self-organization on the Internet. The
example of RePEc

• Thomas Krichel
• 2006-04-07

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about me

• trained economists
• started to work as a leisure librarian organizing
  academic documents on the Internet
• moved on the become a professor in a library
  school
• in research concerned with digital libraries
• in teaching concerned with web site architecture
  and design.

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today I say

• ICT revolution does not only allow for existing
  organizations/institutions to change the way they
  work.
• It also allows some organizations to appear.
• Today I give an example for an organization that
  entirely virtual. I look at RePEc as an
  organization.
• RePEc is active in scholarly communication.

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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

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how does it work

• In most discipline, scholarly journals are the
  backbone of scholarly communication.
• Authors of articles usually do not receive any
  financial payment.
• Usually they have to pay a submission fee.
• All the income from the sales of journals goes to
  publishers, not authors.
• Publishers enjoy much monopoly powers.

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the serials crisis

• Personal subscriptions by academics are rare.
• Publishers face a market where pretty much their
  only customers are libraries.
• Library spending has been flat.
• So how do publisher raise profits?

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price spiral

• Prices rises by publishers lead to
• cancellations by libraries lead
• more price rises by publishers
• Most extreme example in economics journal of
  economic studies
• receives no citations, has no credibility
• costs almost 10,000 per annum
• probably only subscribed to by 1 or 2 libraries.

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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.

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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.

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Open libraries and scholarly communication

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

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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".

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NetEc consortium

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

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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

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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.

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RePEc is based on 560 archives

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

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

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to form a 362k item dataset

• 171,000 working papers
• 187,000 journal articles
• 1,300 software components
• 2,100 book and chapter listings
• 9,000 author contact and publication
  listings
• 9,300 institutional contact listings

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RePEc is used in many services

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

• IDEAS
• RuPEc
• EDIRC
• LogEc

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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 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
• .

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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

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how does RePEc operate?

• no formal organization
• a group of volunteers communicates through a
  list, sometimes privately
• Each volunteer has an area that he is specialized
  in. There is, however, no formal list of
  responsibilities.

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key to success

• Disseminate as widely as possible
• Demonstrate to authors and institutions that it
  works for them.
• institutional registration
• author registration

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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summary keys 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

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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!

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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

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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

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does RePEc address the serials crises

• Well, not directly!
• RePEc acts as boost to non-traditional, most of
  the time open access publishing.
• It illustrates open access as a way to improve
  exposure of papers.
• It reduces the cost of maintaining open access
  channels.

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what I do for open libraries

• Create an open library for library science the
  rclis (reckless) dataset.
• Create a supporting organization
• the open library society.
• co-workers welcome!

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http//openlib.org/home/krichel

• Thank you for your attention!