Open Access Repository EconStor now with more than 200,000 full-texts

Germany’s largest repository for economics literature gives access to publications from all over the world – collaboration with publishers becomes increasingly important
Kiel/Hamburg, 18 August 2020: EconStor (www.econstor.eu) is Germany’s most important Open Access repository for economics literature. It is operated by the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (www.zbw.eu). Within the recent years EconStor has assembled more than 200,000 freely accessible scholarly publications. Content from commercial publishers have an ever larger share in this growth beside the traditional publishing partners from economics research institutions.
This year, EconStor has reached a remarkable size with now more than 200,000 publications. In comparison: five years ago the collection contained 100,000 full-texts. Researchers from all over the world value the EconStor service in three respects:

1. EconStor as an information source – in 2019 alone EconStor counted more than 6.7 million downloads of digital full texts.
2. EconStor as a publication archive – research institutions as well as individual researchers can archive their publications long-term, safely and citably without extra costs Almost 600 institutional partners and more than 1,000 individual authors currently use EconStor to disseminate their publications.
3. EconStor as a distributor in highly frequented international databases and search engines – EconStor has been among RePEc’s ten most important full-text archives worldwide for several years now.

Olaf Siegert, head of Publishing Services at the ZBW, states: “We are happy that so many universities, research institutions and individual authors use our service to disseminate their publications, not only in Germany but also worldwide. EconStor also plays an ever larger role for publications from agreements with publishers. The Open Access transformation, strongly driven by initiatives such as OA2020, DEAL and Plan S, will further amplify this trend.”

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.”

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).

EconStor among the TOP25 repositories in Europe

New edition of webometrics ranking compares repositories worldwide and by region 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 12th edition.

Compared to earlier rankings EconStor has climbed several places and now ranks at number 52 worldwide, with the TOP positions held by SSRN, ArXiv and the NASA Astrophysics Data System. Looking at fulltext content only (category “rich files”), EconStor fares even better, being now number 15 worldwide and number 7 in Europe.

EconStor documents now including cover pages

All documents from EconStor are now equipped with a separate cover page. This page is not part of the original paper, but is rather a service to our users, which gives them some information about the metadata, where they got the paper from and a suggestion for citation. Here’s one example

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.