RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (http://repec.org) is a volunteer-driven initiative to create a public-access database that promotes scholarly communication in economics and related disciplines. The database contains information on more than 207,000 items:

• 3,000 individual professionals (their contact information and associated publications)
• 6,900 institutions (economics departments, research institutes, and governmental organizations)
• bibliographic information on 116,000 working papers published by institutions and individuals
• bibliographic citations for 80,000 articles from the leading journals in the discipline
• bibliographic citations for 500 books and chapters
• 940 software descriptions and programs

RePEc's capabilities are unique in this regard: the RePEc database links information on the published and unpublished works of thousands of economists. RePEc promotes scholarly communication by providing a database that welcomes all providers of unpublished materials (working papers, discussion papers, research reports, conference papers) and publishers of journals (including scholarly societies, commercial and non-commercial publishers) to place their bibliographic information in the public domain. Individual economists are invited to identify the documents they have authored in the database. RePEc is volunteer-driven, and all RePEc information is freely available from web-based RePEc services such as IDEAS (http://ideas.repec.org)