Digital scholarly communication in Economics: from NetEc to RePEc

1. Digital scholarly communication in Economics: from NetEc to RePEc Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel work partly sponsored by the Joint Information Systems Committee through its Electronic Libraries Programme

2. Structure of this talk • History from NetEc (founded 1993) to RePEc (founded 1997) • Operational principles and mission of RePEc

3. 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 Early history of my interest

4. TheFoundation 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.

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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.

14. Thefoundationof 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

15. RePEcprinciple • 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. WoPEc EconWPA DEGREE S-WoPEc NBER CEPR US Fed in Print IMF OECD MIT University of Surrey CO PAH RePEc is based on 130+ archives

17. …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.

18. BibEc and WoPEc Decomate Z39.50 service NEP: New Economics Papers Inomics IDEAS RuPEc EDIRC HoPEc RePEc is used in many services

19. … describes documents Template-Type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0 Title: Dynamic Aspect of Growth and Fiscal Policy Author-Name: Thomas Krichel Author-Person: RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel Author-Email: T.Krichel@surrey.ac.uk Author-Name: Paul Levine Author-Email: P.Levine@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: RePEc:sur:surrec:9601

20. … 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 England Email: t.krichel@surrey.ac.uk Homepage: http://gretel.econ.surrey.ac.uk Workplace-Institution: RePEc:edi:desuruk Author-Paper: RePEc:sur:surrec:9801 Author-Paper: RePEc:sur:surrec:9601 Author-Paper: RePEc:rpc:rdfdoc:concepts Author-Paper: RePEc:rpc:rdfdoc:ReDIF Handle: RePEc:per:1965-06-05:THOMAS_KRICHEL

21. … describes institutions (EDIRC) Template-Type: ReDIF-Institution 1.0 Primary-Name: University of Surrey Primary-Location: Guildford Secondary-Name: Department of Economics Secondary-Phone: (01483) 259380 Secondary-Email: economics@surrey.ac.uk Secondary-Fax: (01483) 259548 Secondary-Postal: Guildford, Surrey GU2 5XH Secondary-Homepage: http://www.econ.surrey.ac.uk/ Handle: RePEc:edi:desuruk

22. 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.

23. 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.