Volunteer opportunities at RePEc
Volunteering with RePEc is an excellent opportunity to serve the profession and, for faculty, to fulfill the public service component of your position. RePEc is entirely volunteer based and we rely on the help of many to provide a free service to everyone. This is your chance to be part of this undertaking!Below is a list of possible opportunities to volunteer. There may be more and you may have your own ideas. To get a pulse of what is going on, you may want to have a look at the RePEc wiki, RePEc on GitHub, or the repec-run mailing list
- Maintainer of the CollEc project
- CollEc works on co-authorship data to determine centrality of authors as well as the shortest path between any twoco-authors. There is an established code-base and data, but this needs maintenance.
- RePEc Archive Maintainer
- This is the most common volunteer work. As an archive maintainer, you make sure that the publications of your institution are listed in RePEc. Instructions are available.
- NEP Report Editor
- NEP Reports disseminate every week new online working papers in over 90 fields. Editors get a listing of all new papers and decide which ones should be featured in their report. We estimate the time an editor spends on a report is less than a hour every week. Tools based on artificial intelligence are being developed to cut this time down.
Editors for the following fields are currently being sought:
- CWA: Central and West Asia
- IAS: Insurance Economics
- Suggest a new report!
- Editor for the Munich Personal RePEc Archive
- The Munich Personal RePEc Archive allows authors whose institution does not yet participate in RePEc to upload papers and have them listed on RePEc. A team of editors helps making sure that uploaded documents are legitimate. New members to this team are welcome, in particular for languages that are not yet covered and for English. To volunteer, contact Volker Schallehn.
- Metadata quality analyst for the Munich Personal RePEc Archive
- MPRA accepts uploads from anybody, which means there is variation in the quality of the data users input in the forms. We are seeking several individuals who would check on the quality of this data and make amends if necessary. To volunteer, contact Volker Schallehn.
- Help with EDIRC
- EDIRC is a database that provides links to Economics departments, instutites, think tanks and relevant governmental institutions, as well as societies. This data is in particular used for affiliations in the RePEc Author Service and for rankings. This database has grown tremendously, and help is needed to maintain it. You can help fixing bad links or add new links. If you want to help with a particular country, contact Christian Zimmermann. Help is particularly needed for Russia, China, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. Email also with any correction to the database you may have.
- Help with the RePEc Author Service
- RePEc Author Service enables authors to create online profiles linking to their works in RePEc. It also helps in identifying citations. Help is sought in monitoring the activity on the service and managing the profiles of deceased authors.
- Help with the RePEc Genealogy
- The RePEc Genealogy is an academic family tree for economics that shows who was the thesis advisor of whom, and where economists studied. This is a wiki-like crowd-sourced project, thus anybody can help if they have the information. Data entry is through simple forms.
- Help with the RePEc Biblio
- The RePEc Biblio is a bibliography of economics curated by volunteer editors. For any topic, sub-topic, sub-sub-topic, etc, editors identify which are the 10-20 most important papers and articles. Editors are still sought for many topics, and you can suggest your own. Have you written a survey on a topic? Or taught a class on the topic? You can likely help! To become an editor, contact the current editor of the topic above yours, or Christian Zimmermann.
- Member of RePEc Plagiarism Committee
- The RePEc Plagiarism Committee is looking for individuals with integrity to handle and vote on potential plagiarism cases.
- General help with RePEc
- There are always various programming tasks that need tending. Also, users have questions, need help or otherwise require attention. For this, we draw on a pool of core volunteers that is always glad to find someone new for help. The basic requirements are: familiarity with programming, knowlegde of Unix/Linux, HTML, perl or mySQL are a plus.
- Spread the word about RePEc
- Encourage more people to use RePEc, more authors to register and more institutions to participate.
- Contribute hardware or hosting services
- As our databases grow and our services expand, our computing needs expand as well. If you have a spare machine, slot, component (memory, hard drive, UPS), they could be used! Also, we are always looking for some hosting.