A quiet revolution has taken place regarding access to economic research, and this revolution is especially important for economists in developing countries such as Bangladesh. Ten years ago, it would have been difficult for a Bangladeshi researcher or policy makers to benefit from easy access to the recent economics literature relevant to his/her job, be it related to monetary policy or the fight against poverty.
Due in part to a rapid increase in the number of economics journals, most libraries could not afford to carry print versions of the many specialised journals that are needed to keep abreast of development in one's field....
Today, by contrast, thanks to the power of the web, amazing resources are now available for free through websites such as SSRN (Social Science Research Network) or RePEc (Research Papers in Economics). RePEc is probably the website of choice for economists with (as of the end of February 2009) 712,000 items of interest. This includes 282,000 working papers, 422,000 journal articles, 1,700 software components, and 5,000 book and chapter listings. Some 19,300 authors are listed on the website, with their detailed contact information and publication listings. The site also includes 11,100 institutional contact listings.
Typing "Bangladesh" in the RePEc website generates about 1,000 hits in terms of economics papers related to the country. More than half of those papers are less than five year old and many are working papers which can be downloaded right away....
While sites such as RePEc should be of special interest to economists in developing countries because of the possibility of accessing a huge database of economics papers for free, it turns out that to this day, participation from developing countries to the RePEc effort remains limited....
This means that the work of Bangladeshi researchers, which is substantial, is not well disseminated. This does not need to be. First, Bangladeshi institutions that have working paper series can register the series with RePEc. Second, even when researchers belong to institutions without well-established working paper series, it is easy for the researchers not only to register with RePEC but also to post their work on the site through yet another tool -- the Munich Personal RePEc Archive, or MPRA. MPRA accepts submissions of working papers from anybody in the world....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/13/2009 12:09:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
