25 years ago, on 12 May 1997, a meeting among a few economists and librarians laid the foundation for RePEc. Thomas Krichel describes this meeting in a recent RePEc blog post. As more research was starting to get shared on the web, it became infeasible to index all of it by hand. A new scheme was agreed on that, in essence, set rules for sharing metadata about research publications in economics. These rules still apply today, despite the tremendous growth that RePEc enjoyed. Over 2000 publishers maintain RePEc archives, carrying over 10,000 serials, including close to 4,000 journals. 25 years ago, no one was expecting that much.
Coincidentally, a few days ago RePEc surpassed 4 million indexed research items. The graph about shows the evolution of the number of research items.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
