EconStor is now among the TOP20 RePEc archives

Increased visibility for German research publications in Economics

RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) is the most important database for publications in economics, currently holding more than one million bibliographic records. Many of the documents are in Open Access and therefore freely accessible on the internet. The RePEc database has a worldwide scope and offers researchers and institutions relevant functions such as citation analysis, alerting services and rankings to measure their research output and its impact. Renowned academic publishers such as Elsevier, Blackwell-Wiley and Springer also use the database as a multiplier for their journals. Moreover, RePEc is the largest scholars’ network in its field with more than 30,000 registered economic researchers.

As a national service institution for RePEc, the Open Access publication server EconStor organises the publication records for nearly one hundred German institutions and advises them and their researchers on the optimal use of RePEc. This service is free of charge and includes not only the uploads of publications but also the provision and processing of the title data such as abstracts, author keywords and classifications. Based on publication agreements with the institutions, publications are permanently archived on EconStor and made available in Open Access. Documents are searchable not only in RePEc, but also in Google and other economic portals such as EconBiz and Economists Online.

Publications from economics faculties at universities, but also from research institutes of the Leibniz Association, the Max Planck Society, the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, the Helmholtz Association and the German research association Verein für Socialpolitik add up to more than 32,000 titles in EconStor. Among these publications are working and discussion papers, journal articles and conference contributions. The RePEc service of EconStor was initially funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and is now sustainably maintained by a team of ZBW experts.

60% of Journals Allow Immediate Archiving of Peer-Reviewed Articles

Good news for Repository Managers:

According to new charts published on the SHERPA/RoMEO Blog 87% of journals allow some form of immediate self-archiving of articles, although in only 60% of cases is this a post-peer-reviewed version.
http://romeo.jiscinvolve.org/wp/?p=196
This rises impressively once embargo periods have expired and any other restrictions have been complied with, showing that 94% of journals permit peer-reviewed articles to be archived. Furthermore, nearly a quarter of journals allow the publisher’s version/PDF to be archived. Only 5% of journals do not permit any form of archiving.

The statistics were compiled from a snapshot of the RoMEO Journals database taken on the 15th Nov.2011, when it contained about 19,000 titles.