REPEC AS A SOSTENIBILITY [sic] MODEL OF AN OPEN LIBRARY OF SCIENTIFIC CONTENTS

A Spanish-language article with an English-language abstract: RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) is the largest academic open access digital library world wide. It references more than 900.000 documents in electronic format. Download of articles and papers it is around 700.000 a month in the last year. In its thirteen years of life, it has become in an indispensable information source of the latest research results in Economics. The RePEc architecture is distributed. More than 1200 institutions collaborate to build a public dataset. Several value added services use the data: alerts about new contents, citation indexing, etc. All contents are re-usable so that any institution may use them for its own community or to build new services for end users. The RePEc business model is based on the same principles as the open source movement: volunteer collaboration through common procedures to add metadata to a shared, open access and re-usable dataset. At a time when the business models of other similar initiatives like arXiv are under review due to sustainability problems, it is interesting analyze the RePEc model. This model has proven strong and sustainable since it is based in a community of users with shared interests. In this paper we introduce RePEc, analyze its business model study its strengths and weaknesses.