The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is a

repository Repository may refer to: Archives and online databases * Content repository, a database with an associated set of data management tools, allowing application-independent access to the content * Disciplinary repository (or subject repository), an ...

for

preprints In academic publishing, a preprint is a version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes formal peer review and publication in a peer review, peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal. The preprint may be available, often as a non-ty ...

devoted to the rapid dissemination of scholarly research in the

social sciences Social science is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among individuals within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of soci ...

humanities Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture. In the Renaissance, the term contrasted with divinity and referred to what is now called classics, the main area of secular study in universities at the t ...

life sciences This list of life sciences comprises the branches of science that involve the scientific study of life – such as microorganisms, plants, and animals including human beings. This science is one of the two major branches of natural science, the ...

, and

health sciences The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to health sciences: Health sciences are those sciences which focus on health, or health care, as core parts of their subject matter. Health sciences relate to multiple acad ...

, among others.

Elsevier Elsevier () is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as ''The Lancet'', ''Cell'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, '' Trends'', th ...

bought SSRN from Social Science Electronic Publishing Inc. in May 2016.

History

SSRN was founded in 1994 by

Michael C. Jensen Michael Cole "Mike" Jensen (born November 30, 1939) is an American economist who works in the area of financial economics. Between 2000 and 2009 he worked for the Monitor Company Group, a strategy-consulting firm which became "Monitor Deloitte ...

and Wayne Marr, both

financial economists Finance is the study and discipline of money, currency and capital assets. It is related to, but not synonymous with economics, the study of production, distribution, and consumption of money, assets, goods and services (the discipline of finan ...

. In January 2013, SSRN was ranked the biggest open-access repository in the world by Ranking Web of Repositories (an initiative of the

Cybermetrics Lab {{unsourced, date=November 2010 The Cybermetrics Lab is a research group of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). The organization is responsible for editing the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities. Currently more than 48,000 web doma ...

, a research group belonging to the

Spanish National Research Council The Spanish National Research Council ( es, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, CSIC) is the largest public institution dedicated to research in Spain and the third largest in Europe. Its main objective is to develop and promote res ...

), measured by number of PDF files, backlinks and

Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes p ...

results. In May 2016, SSRN was bought from Social Science Electronic Publishing Inc. by

. On 17 May 2016, the SSRN founder and chairman

wrote a letter to the SSRN community in which he cited SSRN CEO Gregg Gordon's post on the

Elsevier Connect Elsevier () is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as ''The Lancet'', ''Cell'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, '' Trends'', th ...

and the "new opportunities" coming from the fusion, such as a broader global network and the freedom "to upload and download papers" (with more data, more resources, as well as new management tools). While predicting "some conflicts" on the interests alignment of the former competitors, he defined them as "surmountable". In July 2016 there were reports of papers being removed from SSRN without notice; revision comments from SSRN indicated this was due to copyright concerns. Gordon characterized the issue as a mistake affecting about 20 papers.

Operations

Academic papers in

Portable Document Format Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...

can be uploaded directly to the SSRN site by authors and are then available around the world for download. Users can also subscribe to abstracting emails covering a broad range of research areas and topic specialties. These distributing emails contain abstracts (with links to the full text where applicable) of papers recently submitted to SSRN in the respective field. SSRN, like other preprint services, circulates publications throughout the scholarly community at an early stage, permitting the author to incorporate comments into the final version of the paper before its publication in a journal. Moreover, even if access to the published paper is restricted, access to the original working paper remains open through SSRN, so long as the author decides to keep the paper up. Often authors take papers down at the request of publishers, particularly if they are published by commercial or university presses that depend on payment for paper copies or online access. As of 2019, download by users is generally subject to registration and/or completion of a

ReCAPTCHA reCAPTCHA is a CAPTCHA system that enables web hosts to distinguish between human and automated access to websites. The original version asked users to decipher hard to read text or match images. Version 2 also asked users to decipher text or ...

challenge and therefore SSRN is not considered by some to be a suitable

open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...

location, unlike

open archive An open repository or open-access repository is a digital platform that holds research output and provides free, immediate and permanent access to research results for anyone to use, download and distribute. To facilitate open access such repositori ...

s like most

institutional repositories An institutional repository is an archive for collecting, preserving, and disseminating digital copies of the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution. Academics also utilize their IRs for archiving published work ...

. Publishers and institutions can upload papers and charge a fee for readers to download them. On SSRN, authors and papers are ranked by their number of downloads, which has become an informal indicator of popularity on prepress and

sites.

References

External links

* {{Reed Elsevier Elsevier Engineering literature Eprint archives Medical literature Open-access archives Organizations established in 1994 Social sciences literature

History

Operations

See also

References

External links