The future of scholarly communication in Economics

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

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

Disclaimer

All I am saying today is a personal opinion. It does not reflect the official policy of the groups that I am associated with.

These slides may not be distributed without myprior authorisation.

1997: The birth 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

The RePEc three-layer model

• Many archives • One database • Many services

– many user interfaces – providers of archives offer their data to all interfaces

at the same time.

RePEc is based on 120+ archives

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

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

RePEc is used in many services

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

• IDEAS• RuPEc• EDIRC• HoPEc

My vision of RePEc

• It is a collaborative effort of community wide-knowledge sharing.

• RePEc promotes free exchange of data between academics.

• It fights the division of the world in information-rich and information-poor.

• It should work to end the commercial costly commercial intermediation between academics

Faustian Bargain

• Scholars produce work for free.• Scholars review for free.• Scholars buy back their own work from the

publishers• Academics pay twice!but this system is under attack from two forces

Destroyer 1: Serial cost spiral

• Decline in personal subscriptions, libraries are the single customer group.

• Library spending has little increase.• Price rise for library prices.• Libraries cancel titles.• Publishers raise prices further.

Bergstrom’s proposal

• Do no longer review for journal that have a high cost

• Great echo within the profession, support from – Robert Ashenfelter, Larry Kotlikoff, Gareth Miles,

Martin Osborne, Ariel Rubinstein• Ted will be working on a list of journal most likely

to have monopolistic pricing in the summer.• He will maintain a public list of supporters.

Destroyer 2: Peer review delay

• Now common that it takes about four years to get a paper published.

• Material that is formally published is already way out of date, “museum value”.

• Crucial need for a fast filter (FF).

FF1: “NEP: New Economics Papers”

• Founded 1998 by Thomas Krichel• Set of about 40 reports on recent additions to

RePEc• Editors receive a full list of new additions to

RePEc and make a choice about what papers to include in the report.

• first step towards peer review using RePEc

The future is yours: more fast filters

• First mover advantage is important– old universities are the most famous– old journals are most famous

• Need to know the latest literature anyway• Important value of peer recognition by operating

the filter

FF2: The “Surweb” site

• Site that lists interesting work in a certain area using some structure. It make a short comment on that work.

• May be maintained jointly with a NEP report– list older issues of a report– further selection of items– inclusion of comments to describe “technical

essence”

FF3: The review site• Form a small editorial team

– draw up a set of public guidelines– communicate decisions as a community

• Authors submit papers– require deposit in a RePEc archive – author chooses to put paper publicly visible or not

• 1 before 1 rule– before a paper may be reviewed, all of its authors must

review the paper of another author

• There should be two reports by paper, otherwise editorial team has to help out.

• Editorial team edits a final report out of the two reports – Public element with emphasis on current state of the

paper and its relations to other papers– Private element with emphasis on helping authors to

improve paper• Author may choose to

– publish the paper with the public report attached– withdraw/resubmit the paper

Review site ethics• Do not say that you are competing with journals, rather

say that you are making papers fitter for subsequent review in journals.

• Never say that your service is free, “free” means “bad” to many economists.

• Base your work with RePEc– gives some credibility.– help on technical matters– more fun

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.