Digital scholarly communication in Economics: from NetEc to RePEc Thomas Krichel work partly sponsored by the Joint Information.

Digital scholarly communication in Economics: from NetEc to RePEc

Thomas Krichelhttp://openlib.org/home/krichel

work partly sponsored by the Joint Information Systems Committee through its Electronic Libraries Programme

Structure of this talk

• History from NetEc (founded 1993) to RePEc (founded 1997)

• Operational principles and mission of RePEc

Early history of my interest

1991Contents: Warwick Working

Paper acquisitions lists in CoREJ

Technology: email lists Idea: distribute the acquisitions

lists through email listsleads to the foundation of BibEc

1992Contents: Public domain

software for TeX, emacs, etcTechnology: anonymous ftpIdea: make papers available on

public archive that are accessible on the Internet

leads to the foundation of WoPEc

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bill Goffe’s 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.

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

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.

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

…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.

RePEc is used in many services

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

• IDEAS• RuPEc• EDIRC• HoPEc

… describes documentsTemplate-Type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0Title: Dynamic Aspect of Growth and Fiscal PolicyAuthor-Name: Thomas Krichel Author-Person: RePEc:per:1965-06-

05:thomas_krichelAuthor-Email: [email protected] Author-Name: Paul Levine Author-Email: [email protected] Author-WorkPlace-Name: University of SurreyClassification-JEL: C61; E21; E23; E62; O41 File-URL: ftp://www.econ.surrey.ac.uk/

pub/RePEc/sur/surrec/surrec9601.pdf File-Format: application/pdfCreation-Date: 199603 Revision-Date: 199711 Handle: RePEc:sur:surrec:9601

… 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 EnglandEmail: [email protected]: http://gretel.econ.surrey.ac.ukWorkplace-Institution: RePEc:edi:desurukAuthor-Paper: RePEc:sur:surrec:9801Author-Paper: RePEc:sur:surrec:9601Author-Paper: RePEc:rpc:rdfdoc:conceptsAuthor-Paper: RePEc:rpc:rdfdoc:ReDIFHandle: RePEc:per:1965-06-05:THOMAS_KRICHEL

… describes institutions (EDIRC)

Template-Type: ReDIF-Institution 1.0 Primary-Name: University of SurreyPrimary-Location: GuildfordSecondary-Name: Department of EconomicsSecondary-Phone: (01483) 259380Secondary-Email: [email protected]: (01483) 259548Secondary-Postal: Guildford, Surrey GU2 5XHSecondary-Homepage: http://www.econ.surrey.ac.uk/Handle: RePEc:edi:desuruk

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.

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.