EconStor passes the mark of 100,000 full-texts

Germany’s most important repository for economics now belongs to the twelve largest Open Access archives worldwide.

EconStor, the Open Access publication server of the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics and also Germany’s most important repository for economics, now offers more than 100,000 freely available documents. In the “Ranking Web of Repositories” EconStor is ranked number 12 among more than 2,200 listed archives (category rich files) worldwide.  

This year, EconStor has grown to impressive size. It now offers more than 100,000 freely accessible full texts. Back in 2011 there were only 25,000, growing to  50,000 full-texts in 2013.

Researchers in economics from all over the world value the repository’s services for three reasons:

1. as a source of information: 2.8 million downloads were counted in 2014 (compared to 1.3 million downloads in 2012),
2. as a place where research institutions and individual researchers can archive their publications permanently, safely and citable,
3. as a distributor into much frequented databases – e.g. EconStor is one of the ten most widely used full-text archives within the RePEc network.

EconStor assembles more than 90 per cent of all Economics working papers from Germany and disseminates it on the web. Around 400 national and international institutions use the repository to share their papers, among them Princeton University, the Tinbergen Institute, the Stockholm School of Economics or the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Usage statistics prove EconStor’s international success: About 80 per cent of all downloads come from abroad (mainly from USA, China, the UK and France).

Olaf Siegert, head of publication services at the ZBW, summarises the merits of the repository: “EconStor makes an important contribution to scholarly communication in economics. Our customers value the visibility and findability of their papers in search engines such as Google Scholar, whereas users appreciate the barrier-free and quick access to scholarly publications they look for.”