SourceOECD

» see sourceoecd.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

SourceOECD went live in 2001 as the place where the OECD put its own output. Around 250 books a year, plus 18 series of working papers. Reference volumes arrived rendered as HTML rather than shipped as files, and the OECD Factbook was the one people opened most. Behind all of it sat 82 statistical databases you could query in a browser window, choosing your countries and your years and pulling a table straight out, which in 2001 was closer to a research tool than to a publishing website.

It was never sold to individuals. The customer was a librarian in the broad sense, sitting inside a university or inside a government administration. The OECD put the potential reach at something like 15 million users, which is a figure you only get by counting everybody who works or studies at a subscribing institution rather than everybody who logs in. That distinction is most of what there is to say about the model.

The part that was genuinely ahead of its time was the addressing. Every publication got a DOI at a point when a lot of academic publishers were still treating permanent identifiers as optional. On top of that came what the OECD called Easylinks: take the domain, put the ISBN on the end, and you had a working URL to the book. No search box and no session token, just the identifier you already had printed on the cover.

I was a university student in Turkey across most of the years this thing ran, and what I remember about platforms of this class is the boundary rather than the contents. From outside the campus network you got an abstract and a price. From inside it you got the file. I cannot tell you I ever opened SourceOECD, because the name means nothing to me, but I could describe its login screen from memory without ever having seen it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ behind the library login ~

The institutional subscription is one of the quietest structures on the web and it shaped a decade of how research got read. The reader never sees a price and never signs a contract. Access arrives as a property of the network you happen to be sitting on, so the same person is entitled on Tuesday from a campus desk and locked out on Saturday from home, and nothing about them changed except the IP address.

What this produces is a strange class of dead site. SourceOECD had no fans and no community and nobody wrote a farewell post when it went, because nobody experienced it as a place. It was infrastructure that a librarian negotiated for and a researcher passed through on the way to a PDF. The web is full of these and almost none of them get graves.

~ the address that was the isbn ~

OECD iLibrary took over in July 2010 and ran the same job with a wider catalog for fourteen years. Then in July 2024 the OECD abandoned the whole apparatus and moved to open access, replacing the library with a publications site anyone can read. The subscription that justified SourceOECD's existence in 2001 turned out to have a shelf life of twenty three years.

What deserves to survive it is the Easylink idea. An address you can construct from an identifier you already hold, without querying anything, is the cheapest form of permanence a publisher can offer, and it costs nothing but the discipline not to redesign your URL scheme every few years. Most publishers spent the following two decades failing at exactly that.

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