RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) is not a publisher in the conventional sense - it is a decentralized, volunteer-run bibliographic database that has become the definitive discovery layer for economics research. Founded in 1997 (its precursor NetEc dates to 1993), RePEc aggregates metadata from over 2,000 participating archives - university departments, central banks, research institutes, and all the major commercial publishers - into a single index of more than 5.4 million research items, roughly 4.8 million of them downloadable in full text. Everything is free: free to deposit, free to search, free to read where the full text is open.

If you work in economics, finance, or econometrics, RePEc matters for two reasons. First, it is where working papers get discovered: services such as IDEAS and EconPapers are the default search tools for pre-publication economics research. Second, its monthly rankings of authors, institutions, and journals are widely cited in hiring, funding, and departmental evaluations.

RePEc has no central submission portal. Instead, each participating institution maintains its own archive - a set of metadata files describing its working-paper series or journals - which RePEc services harvest regularly. The bibliographic data is then served through several user-facing sites:

Coverage centers on economics, finance, and econometrics, with spillover into related social sciences. By item type, the index spans roughly 1.3 million working papers, 3.7 million journal articles, plus books, book chapters, and software components. Working papers are the heart of the system: most major economics departments, central banks (including the Federal Reserve system and the ECB), the NBER, CEPR, and the IMF distribute their series through RePEc.

There are two routes, and neither involves submitting to RePEc directly:

1. Through your institution's archive. If your department, central bank, or institute already runs a RePEc archive, deposit your working paper in its series - the metadata flows into RePEc automatically at the next harvest, typically within days.
2. Through MPRA. If you have no institutional archive, upload to the Munich Personal RePEc Archive, which accepts individual deposits and feeds them into RePEc.

Institutions that want to open a new archive follow the step-by-step instructions at repec.org; maintaining one requires only static metadata files on a web or FTP server.

Separately, register with the RePEc Author Service. Registration links your papers to a public profile, enables citation tracking, and makes you eligible for the rankings. About 70,000 economists are registered.

RePEc performs no peer review. Each archive maintainer decides what enters their own series, so quality control is delegated to the issuing institution - an NBER or ECB working paper carries that institution's screening, while MPRA applies only basic checks for scope and plagiarism. Working papers on RePEc should therefore be read as pre-publication research unless the item is the version of record of a published journal article.

IDEAS publishes monthly rankings of registered authors, institutions, and regions, computed from a battery of criteria: citation counts (raw, impact-factor-weighted, and age-discounted), h-index, download and abstract-view statistics from LogEc, and more. Journal and working-paper series are also ranked by simple and recursive impact factors. The rankings update around the start of each month and are widely cited - but they only cover registered authors, which is one more reason to claim your profile.

Cite a working paper found on RePEc as you would any working paper: author, year, title, series name and number, issuing institution. There is no dedicated "RePEc style" - use whatever citation style your target journal requires, and keep the original series information. Every item carries a persistent RePEc handle (e.g., RePEc:nbr:nberwo:12345), which is useful for unambiguous identification, and IDEAS pages provide ready-made citation exports (BibTeX, RIS) plus DOI links where they exist.

Posting a working paper on RePEc is standard practice in economics and is not considered prior publication by economics journals, which routinely referee papers that have circulated as working papers for years. Copyright stays with the author or original copyright holder. When the paper is eventually published, the journal-article record typically enters RePEc through the publisher's own archive, and the Author Service lets you link both versions on your profile.

Everything RePEc-related is free: depositing, searching, NEP alerts, author registration, and rankings. The project runs on volunteer labor and institutional sponsorship (EconPapers at Orebro University, NEP infrastructure at Griffith University), with no APCs, submission fees, or subscription charges anywhere in the system.