Distributing Research on the Internet -
Facilitating Scholarly Communication
Notes from a presentation at the
Third
Nordic Inter Library Loan Conference, Stockholm, November 8-10 1998.
Sune Karlsson, Stockholm School of Economics
Introduction
- Preprints play an important role in scholarly communication
- Limited circulation and hard to find
- RePEc and S-WoPEc one attempt to solve this problem
A publication lag of two years
- Trivedi, P.K. (1993), "An analysis of publication lag in Econometrics," Journal
of Applied Econometrics, 8, 93-100.
- Median time to publication 16 - 30 months
- Median time from acceptance to publication 6 - 11 months
- Of the time to acceptance 70% is spent on review and 30% on revisions
- Bradlow, E.T. and H. Wainer (1998), "Publication Delays in Statistics Journals,"
Chance, 11, 42-45.
- Median time to publication 15 - 30 months
- Average time from acceptance to publication 5 - 14 months
Grey literature
- Working papers, technical reports, manuscripts with limited distribution
- A majority of the researchers are marginalized
but...
- Journals are still indispensable
- Inter library loans an important resource
Accessibility
- Locating the state of the art
Difficult for
- Researchers at small institutions
- Young researchers
- Global and immediate access to research results
Currently
- Commercial services, publishers etc.
- Published material
Internet
- Distribution of preprints through the researchers home page
- Disorganized
- Internet search engines not good enough
Solutions
S-WoPEc & S-WoBA
- Swedish Working Papers in Economics
- Swedish Working Papers in Business Administration
Why?
- Grey literature important
- Access to the most recent research
- Increased exposure for Swedish research
How?
- One-stop access to Swedish research
- Support to Swedish research organizations
- Complements and enhances other resources
- International distribution through RePEc
Giving exposure to Swedish research
- To be published is not sufficient
- Distribution and exposure prior to publication is necessary in order to influence current research
http://swopec.hhs.se
http://swoba.hhs.se
- One-stop access to Swedish research in Economics and Business Administration
- 10 working paper series
- 438 papers, 290 i full text
- 4925 abstracts accesses/month
- 2534 full text files downloaded/month (October 1998)
- Support for making working papers available on the Internet
- Form based and simple input of data
- Assistance with converting word processing documents to pdf and Postscript
RePEc
Research Papers in Economics
- A protocol for making research information available on the Internet
- Started by the English WoPEc, Dutch Degree and S-WoPEc projects
- 54 archives, 851 series, 61889 working papers, 9722 with full text files (October 1998)
- Search engines
- Current Awareness
Programing by
Design by Joachim Ekebom
