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

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