See the step-by-step instructions.

1. Handles are permanent and unique identifiers. NEVER REUSE THEM FOR ANOTHER ITEM. Doing so causes considerable grief, as they are used to create URLs and to crosslink items, authors, references, citations, statistics etc.
2. Use our facilities to check whether templates are OK or whether we have issues accessing your files. Find your archive at the EconPapers check (append your three letter archive code to the URL) and check for alerts in your monthly email.
3. Maintain your data. We can only display what you put in your RePEc archive.
4. Plan for succession. Should somebody else take charge, this person needs to know how your archive works. Also, adjust the contact details in your archive and series templates once succession takes place.

We have a page just for you here.

RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) is a group working on the provision of electronic working papers. We are concerned that the uncoordinated provision of archives is inefficient. We believe that joining forces is a good thing because we can learn from each other how to do things better and promote our work together. Check the RePEc website for details.

Quite a lot in fact. For details, see LogEc, which covers traffic at some of the RePEc services.

RePEc services use the data collected through RePEc. For a listing of them, look on the RePEc website.

Not necessarily. You may maintain only the RePEc archive, and then link to the display of your series in one of the RePEc services. Or you may use your RePEc data and have it parsed to create your own web page. Examples: 1, 2, 3.

The best is to provide as much information as possible. With an Abstract:, items are more likely to be found. The same applies to Classification-JEL:. If there is no date, the item will be dropped at the end of many listings. Some RePEc services use the Keywords:. Also, having an item online with a File-URL: definitely increases interest. Get your authors to register with the RePEc Author Service will generate crosslinks between thew abstract pages and and their profiles. Finally, our citation analysis also creates crosslinks between citing and cited works. If you full texts are not freely accessible (or not directly accessible because there is an intermediate page), see instructions on the CitEc site.

The templates are used by the various RePEc services, listed on the RePEc web sites. They are also relayed by the Open Archives Initiative to its own services, which include for example Yahoo Search.

RePEc transfers the data automatically to NEP and Econlit, for the series that are eligible. For other abstracting services, you indeed need to submit separately.

Check out the volunteer opportunities. You can also subscribe to the repec-archives mailing list, where various issues are discussed and opportunities for further involvmeent may arise.

RePEc is largely run by volunteers on donated or shared hardware. Various small projects have been covered by small grants.

Most RePEc services update their databases nightly. Crosslinks may take a few days to appear.

Nobody. Everything is done automatically. We only need to be told when the location of your RePEc archive changes.

Some of your papers may already have been catalogued in other serials. This can in particular happen with pre-prints (working papers). This is not a problem. If you series is present (and likely out-of-date) in the RePEc:fth, RePEc:wop or RePEc:wuk archives, you may ask to have them removed.

In most cases no! The vast majority of publishers allow working papers to stay online, in fact many allow even post-print to be put online. To determine which publisher allows what, see this list. Anyway, you do not want to break links.

If by any chance you have to deal with a publisher that requires that you take a paper offline, then only remove the File-* lines in the template. Do not erase the template. This allows us then to put a link from the working paper to the article once the author has claimed both in his/her RePEc Author Service profile.

There is more in this RePEc Blog post.

The most likely issue is that you use one character set to write your templates, but then save your file in another character set. This happens most frequently with UTF-8 character sets ("Unicode") that are in a file that does not have a byte-order mark or an .rdf extension instead of .redif. See question above or a more extensive blog post.