Title: The RePEc model for the academic digital library
1The RePEc model for the academic digital library
- Thomas Krichel
- http//openlib.org/home/krichel
- work partly sponsored by the Joint Information
Systems Committee through its Electronic
Libraries Programme
2Early 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
3The Foundation of NetEc
- NetEc is a group of Internet-based services that
help scholarly communication in Economics. - 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.
4The 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
5The 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
6BibEc 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
7Closely Related efforts 1993--1997
- EconWPA
- manually integrated into WoPEc since 1994
- Fed in Print
- manually integrated into BibEc and WoPEc since
1994 - departmental archives eg, Humbolt Universität,
University of California San Diego - DEGREE
- S-WoPEc
8Related 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
9Projects 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
10Projects sponsored by NetEc since 1997
- RePEc (1997--)
- NEP (1998--)
- HoPEc (founded 1997, reformed in1999, ongoing)
- I will come back to these activities later.
11Summary 1997
- A plethora of services,
- many live through centralized collection
therefore not sustainable as the data mass
increases, - most have specific user interfaces to their data,
- many are mirrored.
12Focus 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
13Bill 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.
14The 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
15RePEc 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.
16Many archives decentralize the collection of data
- At the end of 1999, there are more than 100
archives. Some are based with leading
institutions (e.g. NBER, CEPR, US Federal Reserve
Banks, OECD) and many small institutions (e.g.
University of Salerno). There is some data from
commercial publishers (e.g. Springer Verlag). - Example The RePEctky archive
- ftp//ftp.e.u-tokyo.ac.jp/pub/RePEc/tky
- managed by cirje-dp_at_e.u-tokyo.ac.jp
17to form one dataset...
- over 80,000 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 18,000 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.
18used in many services.
- BibEc and WoPEc
- EDIRC
- IDEAS
- Decomate Z39.50 service
- NEP New Economics Papers
- Inomics
- RuPEc
- HoPEc
19The ReDIF metadata format
- relational metadata links separately described
elements - Author-Name Thomas Krichel
- Author-Handle RePEcper1965-06-05thomas_krichel
- Handle RePEcsursurrec9801
- Name Thomas Krichel
- Author-Paper RePEcsursurrec9801
- Handle RePEcper1965-06-05thomas_krichel
- shipped with syntax and relational control
software
20Personal and institutional data
- Since October 1999 the HoPEc service allows
persons to claim relationships between them and
the resource data in RePEc. For example a person
can say that she is the editor of a series. The
HoPEc project associates handles with
individuals. These handles could be useful in
many other circumstances, for example conferences
and scholarly society membership lists. - Many registering authors are able to give the
EDIRC handle of their institutional affiliation
21Areas not covered by RePEc
- No statistical dataset information
- No overall preservation strategy
- No overall usage logs across all services this
would be difficult to do - No explicit peer-review services based on RePEc
data but that will change.
22The RePEc vision
- It is a collaborative effort of community wide
knowledge sharing by discpline champions and
librarians. - Once a critical mass of data and user services is
reached outsiders face strong incentives to
contribute. - The relational features allow to share the burden
of cataloguing and reduce the cost of keeping the
collection up-to-date. - RePEc promotes free exchange of data between
academics. - It fights the division of the world in
information-rich and information-poor.
23My ongoing work
- Introduce autonomous citation analysis for RePEc
papers (funding decision pending) - Build new datasets that use the same collection
principles - ReLIS for Library and Information Science
- ReCMaP Computing, Mathematics Physics
- ReSoS for the broad social sciences
- Devise a syntax-independent and object-oriented
version of ReDIF
24But I can not do all this while being a lecturer
in Economics...