Participating in RePEc

There is some documentation about RePEc available for starters. They explain the common description of information about the working papers and articles, which will be used by the various services (like IDEAS) to be displayed on the web or through email.

To be listed in IDEAS, there are several options:

1. If you want to put your papers online but do not have a place to put them, put them at the Munich Personal RePEc Archive (MPRA). That way, your papers will be listed also in NEP, IDEAS and EconPapers.
2. You can also build your own RePEc archive. This has the advantage that you have full control on your bibliographic data and it is easy to amend it for revisions or withdrawals, and you do not have to rely on others. Then, your data will be incorporated into RePEc, mirrored by IDEAS and EconPapers and, for papers that are online, by NEP. See below, or jump to the step by step instructions. Note that RePEc archives are not intended to be personal archives, but rather institutional ones.

Note that it is useless to tell us that your working papers are on your web page. We do not have the resources to surf regularly and put them in the database by hand! Your best bet is to open a RePEc archive, and this is much simpler than it appears! See also this RePEc Blog post for more options.

It should be noted that RePEc does not limit itself to working papers. Articles, software components and books are also welcome, but they can only be indexed by the respective publishers, much like for working papers.

How do you set up your own RePEc archive?

To have a RePEc archive, you need access to an http server or an anonymous ftp server. There are simple step by step instructions on how to set the archive up, from file names to file content. Additional documentation is available: the Guildford Protocol (GuilP) describes the philosophy of the RePEc undertaking, and probably more useful for an archive maintainer, a description of the Research Documents Information Format (ReDIF) that shows the complete syntax to be used in your bibliographic info.

If you find this easier, a set of templates to cut and paste then fill with the relevant information is available.

Note that you may not want to build your archive from scratch. Some of your working papers may already have been catalogued by volunteer. To see this, take a look at the list of working paper series at IDEAS. If your institution is listed, see tips and tricks for RePEc archive maintainers on how to transfer them.

Here is a list of other RePEc services, and the list of existing RePEc archives. For those that have already opened a RePEc archive, tips and tricks are available.

Comments to Christian Zimmermann