A Whiter Shade of Grey - a case study on how OECD Publishing cleared up the mess that was its working papers.

OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) is a research-based Intergovernmental Organisation in the field of socio-economics. Its many published outputs include a number of Working Paper series - a format that is widely used by economists for informal or work-in-progress communication to their peers. In common with other economics institutions, OECD's Working Papers are freely available via the institution's websitei. A few were also posted on Repecii (Research Papers in Economics), a volunteer-based collaborative website that provides a decentralized database of working papers from around the globe. However, there was a problem. OECD's website is very large and librarians were reporting a great deal of frustration among their users because they couldn't easily locate particular papers. Equally, the collection of OECD working papers on Repec was far from complete and links to the full text were often broken. In fact, the situation was so poor that at UKSG, a conference for the serials community held annually in the UK, a room full of 250 librarians laughed at a representative from OECD Publishing about the state of the problem. Stung by this criticism, OECD Publishing resolved to fix the problem: this is the story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]