Predatory Publishing and Economics

What differentiates predatory journals from serious journals? How can researchers protect themselves against publishing in a predatory journal?

The ZBW has compiled a handout giving you a brief survey and supplying tools to protect against predatory publishers:
https://www.zbw.eu/fileadmin/pdf/forschung/2018-handreichung-predatory-publishing.pdf

Recommendations for RePec ranking optimization

In one it’s recent posts, the RePEc team has released some recommendations for Authors and Institutions to make better use of  their ranking positions. As RePEc rankings are increasingly popular among the Econonomics research community, this seems to be very good approach. Compared  to other rankings RePEc is quite transparent about the methods used to compile it’s charts.

EconStor with new design and new features

After 5 years with the same look and feel,  EconStor has now received a facelift.

Among the new features are:

• A better and faster search (including facets)
• A visual and geographical presentation of our content partners
• a mobil optimized web design for better  use on tablets and  smartphones
• a new colour (green instead of blue) in our logo

We hope to make EconStor more user-friendly with these innovations and are keen to hear about your opinion.  Please let us know in this blog.

Econstor Relaunch

Today EconStor is undergoing a major relaunch. Therefore the site will be down for a few hours before coming back improved and more user-friendly.In the meantime you are redirected to our blog site. So If you want to download a paper, please visit us again later today.

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.”

EconStor Downtime

EconStor will be offline on 19th June 2015 from 1:00 pm to 12 pm CET due to urgent repairs on our power supply.
We apologize for any inconvenience!

EconStor now in RePec TOP 10

Latest statistics sees EconStor among the ten most heavily used archives in RePec

Most Economists know, that RePEc publishes rankings on publications, authors and research institutions.  Less known is the fact, that RePec also provides statistics on it’s contributing archives and how they perform. These archives can come from university faculties (e.g. for their working papers), from publishers (for their journals) or from repositories (either institutional or subject based). A ranking of the largest archives is provided on the RePEc homepage (see also screenshot on the right).

As a subject repository with a focus on the German Economics community EconStor provides it’s RePEc input services for over 100 institutions, which places as amont the TOP 20 archives with respect to size.

But even more pleasant (and also more important to our customers) is the fact, that papers on EconStor are also heavily used. Looking at the detailed LogEc statistics for all contributing archives in RePEc, we find that EconStor (acronym “zbw”) is at number 10 concerning the use of our archives (number of downloads).

Webometrics Ranking confirms: EconStor among the 20 biggest Repositories worldwide

New edition of webometrics ranking now also includes Altmetrics indicators. EconStor ranks at number 17 concerning full-text documents.

The “Ranking Web of Repositories” is a service provided by the Spanish Reseseach Organization CSIC. Besides comparing repositories it also ranks Universities, Business Schools and Hospitals. The repository ranking is published every 6 months, now in it’s 14th edition.

The latest edition, which was published this week, introduced a new element among the relevant criteria for the ranking: The “Altmetrics”-Element (which accounts for 25% of the ranking) is monitoring services like Twitter, Wikipedia and Google+ and looks up, how often repository documents are mentioned in these service.

The new Webometrics repository ranking sees EconStor at number 45 (out of 1750 repositories worldwide) in the overall ranking. When it comes to the number of PDF-Documents within a repository (category “rich files”), EconStor comes out even better at Number 17. Concerning the coverage in Google Scholar, we rank at number 21.

EconStor Downloads now compliant with COUNTER

In order to make the EconStor download numbers more comparable with other services, we now use the internationally established COUNTER standard to measure our download usage.
Moreover we supply not only the download counts for individual papers, but also for whole collections or even for institutions. Plus we provide information about the breakdown of downloads by country.
For more information, please click here.

Important aspect: We found, that the Download numbers measured via COUNTER only differ about 10-20% from our internal download numbers, that we have used before.

EconStor climbs to number 29 in new Webometrics repository ranking

New edition of webometrics ranking compares over 1700 repositories worldwide according to several categories.

The “Ranking Web of Repositories” is a service provided by the Spanish Reseseach Organization CSIC. Besides comparing repositories it also ranks Universities, Business Schools and Hospitals. The repository ranking is published every 6 months, now in it’s 13th edition.

Compared to earlier rankings EconStor has climbed several places and now ranks at number 29 worldwide, climbing almost 50 places (from number 77) within one year! And in the European Repository ranking EconStor now stands at number 11.

The TOP5 positions of the ranking are also held by subject based repositories or databases (ArXiv, RePEc, PubMed Central, Citeseer and SSRN).