Working towards an Open Library for Economics: The RePEc project

After arXiv.org, the RePEc Economics library offers the second-largest source of freely downloadable scientific preprints in the world. RePEc has a different business model and a different content coverage than arXiv.org. This paper addresses both differences. As far as the business model is concerned, RePEc is an instance of a concept that I call the “Open Library”. An Open Library is open in two ways. It is open for contribution (third parties can add to it), and it is open for implementation (many user services may be created). Conventional libraries—including most digital libraries—are closed in both directions. As far as the content coverage is concerned, RePEc seeks to build a relational dataset about scholarly resources and other aspects of reality that are related to these resources. This basically means identifying all authors, all papers and all institutions that work in economics. Such an ambitious project can only be achieved if the cost to collect metadata is decentralized and low, and if the benefits to supply metadata are large. The Open Library provides a framework where these conditions are fulfilled. This paper is available online at http://openlib.org/home/krichel/myers.html. ∗The work discussed here has received financial support by the Joint Information Systems Committee of the UK Higher Education Funding Councils through its Electronic Library Programme I am grateful to Ivan V. Kurmanov for comments on an earlier version. This paper was presented at the PEAK conference at the University of Michigan on 2000–03–24. On 2001–03–05, I made cosmetic changes to this document as suggested by Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason. These suggestions have much improved the readability of the paper without updating its contents.