information policy issues in RePEc

Thomas Krichel

2009-02-24

todays talk

• “information policy” In fact, I am only talking about copyright issues here.

• “RePEc” I have to take some time to explain what RePEc is. I will start with some history.

RePEc History

• It started with me as a research assistant an in the Economics Department of Loughborough University of Technology in 1990.

• a predecessor of the Internet allowed me to download free software without effort

• but academic papers had to be gathered in a painful way

CoREJ

• published by HMSO– Photocopied lists of contents tables recently

published economics journal received at the Department of Trade and Industry

– Typed list of the recently received working papers received by the University of Warwick library

• The latter was the more interesting.

working papers

• early accounts of research findings• published by economics departments

– in universities– in research centers– in some government offices– in multinational administrations

• disseminated through exchange agreements

• important because of 4 year publishing delay

1991-1992

• I planned to circulate the Warwick working paper list over listserv lists

• I argued it would be good for them– increase incentives to contribute– increase revenue for ILL

• After many trials, Warwick refused. • During the end of that time, I was offered a

lectureship, and decided to get working on my own collection.

1993: BibEc and WoPEc

• Fethy Mili of Université de Montréal had a good collection of papers and gave me his data.

• I put his bibliographic data on a gopher and called the service "BibEc"

• I also gathered the first ever online electronic working papers on a gopher and called the service "WoPEc".

NetEc consortium

• BibEc printed papers

• WoPEc electronic papers

• CodEc software

• WebEc web resource listings

• JokEc jokes

• HoPEc

a lot of Ec!

WoPEc to RePEc

• WoPEc was a catalog record collection

• WoPEc remained largest web access point

• but getting contributions was tough

• In 1996 I wrote basic architecture for RePEc. – ReDIF– Guildford Protocol

1997: 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.

based on close to 1000 archives

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

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

to form a 700k item dataset

279,000 working papers

415,000 journal articles

1,700 software components

5,000 book and chapter listings

18,900 author contact and publication listings

10,800 institutional contact listings

RePEc is used in many services

• Econpapers

• Economists Online

• NEP: New Economics Papers

• Inomics• RePEc author service

• IDEAS

• RuPEc

• EDIRC

• LogEc

• CitEc

… 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: T.Krichel@surrey.ac.uk Author-Name: Paul Levine Author-Email: P.Levine@surrey.ac.uk 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 (RAS)template-type: ReDIF-Person 1.0name-full: MANKIW, N. GREGORYname-last: MANKIWname-first: N. GREGORYhandle: RePEc:per:1984-06-16:N__GREGORY_MANKIWemail: ngmankiw@harvard.eduhomepage:http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/ mankiw/mankiw.htmlworkplace-institution: RePEc:edi:deharusworkplace-institution: RePEc:edi:nberrusAuthor-Article: RePEc:aea:aecrev:v:76:y:1986:i:4:p:676-91Author-Article: RePEc:aea:aecrev:v:77:y:1987:i:3:p:358-74Author-Article: RePEc:aea:aecrev:v:78:y:1988:i:2:p:173-77….

… describes institutions

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

ReDIF data

• ReDIF data may contain abstracts. Thus it is more than just factual information.

• RePEc archives may contain material other than ReDIF data, surch as full-text files of papers. Such documents presumably have the same legal status as the ReDIF data.

copyright of RePEc

• One vision of RePEc copyright is that it has no copyright of its own. All the copyright lies with the individual archives.

• When an archive is opened, there is no formal copyright agreement or licensing of contents.

• The agreement to copy is implicit, like if the material were on a simple web site.

RePEc copyrightable?

• The RePEc dataset has no supporting organization, neither legal nor de facto.

• Thus there is no entity to hold a copyright over RePEc just in case there would be one.

RePEc as a compilation of facts

• It is known since Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991) that a collection of facts is not subject to copyright.

• But standards for originality are usually low.

• Members of the RePEc community did issue a set of licensing conditions.

http://repec.org/docs/RePEcDataUse.html

Use of RePEc data

• You are free to do whatever you want with this data collected on the archives that are described here, provided that:

a. You do not charge for it or include it in a service or product that is not free of charge.

Restrictions b• b. When displaying the contents of a

template (or part of a template) the following fields must be shown if they are present in the template: Title, Author-Name File-Restriction.

• If there is a Restriction field in the series or archive template this should be shown if there is no File-Restriction field

Restrictions c and d

You must participate in RePEc by maintaining an archive that actively contributes material to RePEc.

You do not contravene any copyright statement found in any of the participating archives.

Restriction e

You attribute RePEc as the source of the data: for example, by adding a statement that the data are obtained from RePEc and linking to http://repec.org wherever RePEc data are displayed.

RePEc violates its own conditions

The Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) database is a multi-million dollar cash cow for the American Economic Association. They are strong on historical data and journal articles but weak on working papers.

RePEc have an agreement that hands over their data to the JEL without data return.

Past problems

• Xavier Sala-i-Martin copied EDIRC records on his homepage and claimed they were his. The RePEc team felt this was inappropriate and the abuse was stopped by appeals to his superiors. See http://wot an.liu.edu/home/krichel/email/sala-i-martin. html

• Ecommunics.com copied the entire RePEc dataset but gave no attribution.

http://openlib.org/home/krichel

Thank you for your attention!