The World Bank starts its own Open Access repository

More than 2,000 books, articles, reports and research papers available

The World Bank last week launched its Open Knowledge Repository, which is a one-stop-shop for most of the Bank’s research outputs and knowledge products, providing free and unrestricted access. Additional material, including foreign language editions and links to datasets, will be added in the coming year.

The repository uses a dissemation strategy similar to Econstor, which means that their publications are also visible in

“major international repositories (and databases) such as RePEc (Research Papers in Economics), SSRN and Economists Online. This means that the World Bank publishes just once in its own Open Knowledge Repository while its research is also “harvested” and made openly available through many other searchable online repositories, increasing the number of people able to find World Bank content.”

On top of that, the World Bank also tries to negotiate an Open Access friendly environment for future publications of their researchers:

“The Bank is working with journal publishers to determine fair embargo periods after which peer-reviewed journal articles, as accepted for publication, will be added to the repository. The working paper versions of journal articles are available in the Open Knowledge Repository under a Creative Commons attribution-only (CC BY) license without any embargo period.

World Bank Publisher Carlos Rossel expects embargo periods on journal articles to shorten as more organizations opt for open access and the academic publishing industry adapts to the Internet age. “The changes have been tremendous already, but I think there is a groundswell that is saying that frankly part of the value added by journal publishers can be accomplished through other means, and really what’s most important is for our knowledge to be readily accessible,” he said.”

Read  the full press release here

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.