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RePEc History

Some milestones about the history of RePEc.

Antecedents

Several initiatives predated the formal creation of RePEc: NetEc, WoPEc, EDIRC, EconWPA.
1993.2
Thomas Krichel creates on gopher NetEc, a consortium that at its peak includes WoPEc (online papers), BibEc (print papers), CodEc (software repository), WebEc (online information about economics), BizEc (online information about business), HoPEc (a collection of economist homepages) and JokEc (jokes about economics and economists). NetEc is mirrored at Manchester Computing (UK), Washington University in St. Louis and Hitotsubashi University (Japan).
1993.7.1
The Economics Working Paper Archive (EconWPA) is opened by Bob Parks at Washington University in St. Louis.
1994
NetEc moves to the web
1995
William Goffe suggests: “ What I would suggest is this: a distributed system with any number of sites, each mirroring each other. [...] archives could "join" the system (say it was written in perl so could run on NT as well as Unix). Then you'd have the best of both worlds [...] Such a system could easily grow with the profession's use of the net. Such a system would GREATLY benefit the profession.”
1995.3
Christian Zimmermann sets up his homepage.
1996.3.7
EDIRC, the directory of economics institutions, grows out of Zimmermann's homepage and starts with 350 entries.

RePEc proper

1997.5.12
At a meeting in Guildford (UK), the principles of RePEc are proposed by Thomas Krichel and adopted by those in presence: José Manuel Barrueco Cruz, Sune Karlsson, Thomas Krichel, Thomas Place, and Corry Stuyts.
1997.5.27
The Financial Markets Group at LSE is the first archive to join RePEc
1997.8.4
S-WoPEc starts indexing Scandinavian works.
1997.9
IDEAS is launched by Christian Zimmermann, then at Université du Québec à Montréal. It lists 40,000 items.
1997.9.8
Software components are added to RePEc listings of working papers and journal articles.
1998.5.4
NEP sends its first paper annoucements through email. The project was initiated by an email from Thomas Krichel on 1998.2.4 and a meeting in York (UK) on 1998.2.14. The mailing lists are hosted by JISCmail and the project is headed by John Irons.
1998.6.1
The very first ranking is published, it only looks at page hits for works and series on IDEAS.
1999.1.24
The Review of Economic Dynamics is the first journal to be listed (excepting reviews from central banks). The Canadian Journal of Economics follows a few days later.
1999.9.17
HoPEc is expanded to become an author registration service with self-service by economists.
2000.2.27
Kit Baum registers the repec.org domain.
2000.8.1
The first author ranking is released, still only based on web page hits
2000.8
More that 100,000 works are listed in RePEc.
2000.10
Bernardo Batiz-Lazo takes over leadership of NEP
2000
Statistics about downloads are sent to RePEc archive maintainers.
2001.1.11
CitEc, the citation analysis project, goes live.
2001.2.1
The first institution ranking is published, it includes download numbers.
2001.4.26
LogEc starts aggregating traffic statistics across RePEc services. It is housed at the Stockholm School of Economics
2001.6.27
EconPapers is launched
2002.10.26
IDEAS and EDIRC move to the University of Connecticut
2003
NEP moves to a mailman server hosted by Bob Parks at Washington University in St. Louis.
2004.2.1
The first ranking that includes citations counts and an aggregate score is released
2004.3.21
HoPEc goes through a major overhaul and is rebaptised RePEc Author Service.
2005.1
NEP now uses an expert system to assist editors in their selections.
2005.2
EconPapers and LogEc move to Örebro University.
2005.3
NetEc closes, along with WoPEc and BibEc
2005.7.30
The RePEc Author Service moves to the University of Connecticut
2006.8.6
The Munich Personal RePEc Archive (MPRA) is launched
2007.7.1
The RePEc Author Service now handles citations
2007.9
RePEc lists 500,000 works.
2007.10.25
The RePEc Blog opens
2008.4.27
The RePEc Input Service is inaugurated
2008.8.13
NEP is now available through RSS
2008.8.15
EconAcademics launches
2009
Marco Novarese leads NEP
2009.3.5
The 1000th RePEc archive opens at Kyushu Sangyo University
2009.4.30
20,000 authors are registered with the RePEc Author Service
2009.9.30
Some NEP reports are now blogging
2010.1.1
EconomistsOnline goes live
2011.1
RePEc lists one million works
2011.1.31
The RePEc Plagiarism Committee starts recruiting members.
2011.6.24
IDEAS, EDIRC and the RePEc Author Service move to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
2011.9.21
An initiative that collects exemplary peer review reports launches. It closes later due to lack of interest.
2012.2.28
The RePEc Author Service gets a major upgrade. The most visible part is that authors now have to set shares for multiple affiliations.
2012.3.11
CollEc launches to display co-authorship networks
2012.4.10
EconAcademics is overhauled to display indivdual blog posts
2012.8.21
The RePEc Author Service participates in OpenID and can be used for authentication in other services.
2012.9.28
The RePEc Genealogy is introduced
2013.1.25
MyIDEAS is now available
2013.2.25
The RePEc Biblio launches
2014.1.1
EconomistsOnline closes
2014.08.24
NEP tweets
2014.12.30
IDEAS becomes mobile-friendly, the first in a series of website conversions for a more mobile world.
2015.9
RePEc has an API.
2015.11
The RePEc Genealogy covers 10,000 economists
2016.2
RePEc lists 2 million works
2016.6
2,500 journals are indexed
2016.12
CitEc matches 10 million citations between records in RePEc
NEP made a cumulative 1 million paper announcements
2018.5
The University of Bern opens the 2000th archive
2019.12
3 million items indexed in RePEc
2022.5
4 million items indexed in RePEc
2023.10.30
The St. Louis Fed sponsorship ends
Please send suggestions to Christian Zimmermann.
IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.